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#nerd for life
jonnywaistcoat · 3 months
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I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.
Some of my favourites include:
Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)
Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?
Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?
Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!
Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?
The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.
So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:
Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"
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trashmakerarticle · 6 months
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Everyone thinks that dick was the golden child when in reality it was Jason.
Clark: Bruce who was your favourite robin?
Dick: obviously it’s me?
Tim: it’s dick
Damian: I am superior robin, it will be me.
Bruce: it’s Jason
Everyone: WHAT?!?!???
Bruce: why are you so surprised? He didn’t jump on too my chandeliers which I had to replace each week
*everyone looks at dick*
Bruce: he didn’t drop out of school
*everyone looks at tim*
Bruce: I didn’t have to stop him from killing everyone who annoyed him
*everyone looks at Damian*
Bruce: in fact, he enjoyed school and handed all his homework in on time, we would spend hours in the library reading his favourite classics. He even helped Alfred with most of the cooking, He was my little boy
Jason: stop spreading lies, I hate you go away
Bruce: my precious little boy
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cringethursday · 2 years
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My physics professor just told the class the wildest story from when he was in grad school about building a high voltage unauthorized Tesla coil with the ability to kill a man
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neasoxi · 3 months
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Books and cats.
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gingerthespian · 14 days
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montereybayaquarium · 5 hours
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The four stages of becoming a birder:
🪹Nestling Phase: You start with a casual interest, peeking out of your cozy comfort zone to notice the birds around you.
🐤Fledgling Feats: You spread your wings, equipped with binoculars and guidebooks, ready to explore new habitats and spot diverse species.
🐦‍⬛Perching Proficiency: Your skills sharpen as you learn to identify birds by their calls, habits, and plumage, and feel a sense of accomplishment with each new sighting.
🦅Masterful Migration: Finally, you soar confidently, traversing landscapes near and far, sharing your passion with others. In the end, the true joy of birding lies in the journey itself—every chirp, flutter, and waddle along the way.
Happy National Go Birding Day!
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adventuringartist · 26 days
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“oh gale talks too much” “oh gales pedantic” YOU FOOLS. Are you so weak you cannot appreciate a true yapper? Do you not know the love and joy of listening to someone close to you infodump on their favorite topics? have you never felt the inherit trust that comes with someone sharing their interests to you? Pathetic. You will not survive the winter.
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csuitebitches · 3 months
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Reading tip for when you’re reading something educational (self growth, skill based etc)
When you start your self development journey / want to take it even higher, most of us turn to reading books or articles. We take notes and highlight the areas that we found impactful, we remember those points for a couple of days and then boom - we forget.
books are such a wealth of information but it’s not possible to read every single book you’ve read once multiple times.
you might find it frustrating that you can’t seem to remember all that information when you need to, or you keep racking your brains trying to remember exactly where you had read that particular insight.
here’s a method to help you out.
If you have a kindle / read online, make a Word doc/ pages doc of all the things you’ve highlighted. Copy the highlighted areas, which would be areas that you found hopefully/ intriguing/ interesting, and paste them on the word doc. Use only one document for all your notes of different books and every month or so, take about 30 minutes to rapidly go through them. if you read physical books, take a photo of the sentence/ paragraph that you liked, crop it out so that the other stuff isn’t there, and put that photo in the document.
this allows for a couple of things - information isn’t lost when you finish reading the book. Sometimes we find the solution to a problem too early and when the problem crops up, we don’t remember that we had already found the answer. Two, it allows for revision and three, you may see that with time, the way you understood that particular point changes.
this is not for fictional or fantasy books - this is for books that talk about self development, marketing, sales, technical know how, etc. Stuff that you should remember and would impact your progress positively.
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reasonsforhope · 7 months
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Humans are so cute. They think they can outsmart birds. They place nasty metal spikes on rooftops and ledges to prevent birds from nesting there.
It’s a classic human trick known in urban design as “evil architecture”: designing a place in a way that’s meant to deter others. Think of the city benches you see segmented by bars to stop homeless people sleeping there.
But birds are genius rebels. Not only are they undeterred by evil architecture, they actually use it to their advantage, according to a new Dutch study published in the journal Deinsea.
Crows and magpies, it turns out, are learning to rip strips of anti-bird spikes off of buildings and use them to build their nests. It’s an incredible addition to the growing body of evidence about the intelligence of birds, so wrongly maligned as stupid that “bird-brained” is still commonly used as an insult...
Magpies also use anti-bird spikes for their nests. In 2021, a hospital patient in Antwerp, Belgium, looked out the window and noticed a huge magpie’s nest in a tree in the courtyard. Biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra of Leiden-based Naturalis Biodiversity Center, one of the study’s authors, went to collect the nest and found that it was made out of 50 meters of anti-bird strips, containing no fewer than 1,500 metal spikes.
Hiemstra describes the magpie nest as “an impregnable fortress.”
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Pictured: A huge magpie nest made out of 1,500 metal spikes.
Magpies are known to build roofs over their nests to prevent other birds from stealing their eggs and young. Usually, they scrounge around in nature for thorny plants or spiky branches to form the roof. But city birds don’t need to search for the perfect branch — they can just use the anti-bird spikes that humans have so kindly put at their disposal.
“The magpies appear to be using the pins exactly the same way we do: to keep other birds away from their nest,” Hiemstra said.
Another urban magpie nest, this one from Scotland, really shows off the roof-building tactic:
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Pictured: A nest from Scotland shows how urban magpies are using anti-bird spikes to construct a roof meant to protect their young and eggs from predators.
Birds had already been spotted using upward-pointing anti-bird spikes as foundations for nests. In 2016, the so-called Parkdale Pigeon became Twitter-famous for refusing to give up when humans removed her first nest and installed spikes on her chosen nesting site, the top of an LCD monitor on a subway platform in Melbourne. The avian architect rebelled and built an even better home there, using the spikes as a foundation to hold her nest more securely in place.
...Hiemstra’s study is the first to show that birds, adapting to city life, are learning to seek out and use our anti-bird spikes as their nesting material. Pretty badass, right?
The genius of birds — and other animals we underestimate
It’s a well-established fact that many bird species are highly intelligent. Members of the corvid family, which includes crows and magpies, are especially renowned for their smarts. Crows can solve complex puzzles, while magpies can pass the “mirror test” — the classic test that scientists use to determine if a species is self-aware.
Studies show that some birds have evolved cognitive skills similar to our own: They have amazing memories, remembering for months the thousands of different hiding places where they’ve stashed seeds, and they use their own experiences to predict the behavior of other birds, suggesting they’ve got some theory of mind.
And, as author Jennifer Ackerman details in The Genius of Birds, birds are brilliant at using tools. Black palm cockatoos use twigs as drumsticks, tapping out a beat on a tree trunk to get a female’s attention. Jays use sticks as spears to attack other birds...
Birds have also been known to use human tools to their advantage. When carrion crows want to crack a walnut, for example, they position the nut on a busy road, wait for a passing car to crush the shell, then swoop down to collect the nut and eat it. This behavior has been recorded several times in Japanese crows.
But what’s unique about Hiemstra’s study is that it shows birds using human tools, specifically designed to thwart birds’ plans, in order to thwart our plans instead. We humans try to keep birds away with spikes, and the birds — ingenious rebels that they are — retort: Thanks, humans!
-via Vox, July 26, 2023
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a-killler-queer · 2 months
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How am I supposed to go on with everyday life knowing that Phil submitted multiple clips of him with Dan during the WAD segment of small mundane moments that make life worth living? You can't show me that and expect me to just move on
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hev-mark-iv · 1 month
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neasoxi · 3 months
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A home library.
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hawkwidows · 1 month
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LEADER MIKE WE KNEWWWW IT I REALLY NEVER LOSE
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source
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jenjen4280 · 18 days
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Watching the moon and sun. The Hot Wife is a bit of an astronomy nerd.
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poorly-drawn-mdzs · 4 months
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At the start of this project all I wanted was to 'learn how to draw' using comics as a medium and the MDZS audio drama as inspiration.
I've come *very* far from making simple, 3 panel black and white comics, and I truly do intend to go even further. Thank you to everyone who cheered me on throughout 2023, it has been an incredible year in so many ways I never could have imagined. I look forwards to drawing throughout 2024 B*)
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grimme-and-specs · 25 days
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You know I had to do it to 'em too
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Bonus:
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EDIT, 2024-4-5:
If this gets to 213 notes before 4-13 I will personally redraw this earlier than planned.
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