elwingflight

[elwingflight]

Hi! Hope you are doing ok. I was wondering if you had any resources for a NYC person looking for a job with a biology degree?

Hello anon!

Uhh, its possible I might have suggestions, but I’m going to need way more detail than that to be able to say anything useful. What kind of biology? What kind of degree? What kind of job? (feel free to dm me if you want)

But also, I’m from NYC and a biologist, but have never job-hunted in NYC!

[elwingflight]

[elwingflight]

He’s Italian. He’s bisexual. He loves to read. He’s an Ivy League graduate. He’s a tech bro. He’s a gym rat. He’s a flirt. He gave the Unabomber 4/5 stars on Goodreads. He takes the bus. He’s got a bad back. His politics are incoherent. He’s a gamer. He’s an artist. He shot a healthcare executive

[elwingflight]

My brother and I (Jewish) spoiled Santa for our cousins when we were little.

do children like earnestly and truly believe in santa claus ever? from my earliest memories i just thought it was kind of a fun idea but i never regarded it as strictly true, just like...an unspoken ritual we did on christmas that was a way for my parents to make our christmas presents more exciting. but i did pretend to believe in santa for a long time because i wanted them to have fun with it.

[elwingflight]

In case you were wondering the Swedish opinion on Gävlebocken:

This is a store in Gävle selling christmas bucks and matches right next to one another

[elwingflight]

For perspective: basically the most important holidays/festivals in Judaism are the biblical holidays- those that are specifically named in Torah. Many of them have restrictions on work for at least some the the holiday. This includes Shabbat, of course, the High Holy days, and the three pilgrimage festivals (Sukkot, Shavuot, Passover).

Then there are a variety of more minor holidays/festivals/fast days. This includes Purim and Hanukkah among others. Those two are based on events that happened in biblical times, but they’re rabbinically, rather than biblically, decreed as holidays. Hanukkah, amusingly, is based on a non-canonical text (Maccabees); my understanding is that it entered Jewish tradition through Talmud.

I love Hanukkah! (Although the way its narrative gets coopted by some Jews these days… not so much). I just wish other holidays got anything remotely approaching the awareness in popular knowledge. Not being home for the High Holy days or Pesach sucks significantly more.

Your annual reminder:

Hanukkah is NOT “Jewish Christmas!”

No. No no no.

Christmas is one of the two most theologically important holidays in Christianity. It celebrates the miraculous birth of the Christian deity (at least into one of the deity’s three component parts) on Earth. It is a cornerstone of the Christian religious tradition in every variation of Christianity that celebrates it.

Hanukkah, theologically, not so much importance. (Obviously it is personally important for plenty of people, and provides a connection point to their culture for many Jews, which is still valid.) It celebrates a military victory by observant, unassimilated Jews over the Seleucid Greeks and assimilated Jews and the reinstatement of a Jewish monarchy. It’s not a “love and light” holiday so much as a “the Greeks fucked around and found out” holiday.

Now, none of this means that we don’t love and enjoy Hanukkah. We do! Fried latkes and sufganiyot, dairy products, child-appropriate gambling…Hanukkah has got it all. But it is very, very much not “Jewish Christmas”.

EDIT: correction for clarity

[elwingflight]

A little taxonomic context on this really cool discovery, since @fatehbaz brought it up in the tags!

One thing that makes the discovery of a mummified Homotherium (scimitar-toothed cat) so exciting is that they’re (at least in some senses) more unlike anything that’s still alive today than any other animal for which we’ve found similar remains.

Woolly mammoths and rhinos looked spectacularly different and were ecologically very distinct from their living relatives, and that’s in itself makes them fascinating, but in terms of evolutionary history they’re not really so far from things alive today- at the scale of different genera but same subfamily. Mammoths are most closely related to Asian elephants (closer than Asian and African elephants are to each other), and similarly woolly rhinos are closest to the living (though critically endangered) Sumatran rhino.

Homotherium (along with the more famous Smilodon) belonged to an entirely different subfamily of cats, sister to all of the cats that are still alive today- they’re not close to any living cats in particular. Its incredibly exciting to think about what we can learn from this kind of data about such a different kind of organism, especially since it’s generally possible to extract dna from these mummies. I think the authors are right to make a big deal of that!

Homotherium and friend

[elwingflight]

_____________

Solidarity forever : IWW | Wikipedia article on railway abandonment | All used up : Utah Phillips | The commonwealth of toil : Joe glazer | We have fed you all for a thousand years : IWW | John Henry | I don’t want your millions mister: The Almanac Singers | The big steel rail : Gordon Lightfoot | Chattanooga choo choo | Paradise : John Prine | We have fed you all for a thousand years | I’ve been working on the railroad | We have fed you all for a thousand years | ballad of a Wobbly: David rovics | Ralph Chaplin Speaks | The MTA | Freight Train : Elizabeth Cotton | Freight train blues : Bob Dylan | The city of New Orleans : Arlo Guthrie |Hobos lullaby : Woody Guthrie | Night trian: James brown

[elwingflight]

“kill them with kindness” WRONG. GROND GROND GROND GROND GROND GROND

[elwingflight]

underrated lotr moment is gandalf’s “let me risk a little more light” so the fellowship can see the ruins of dwarrowdelf.

[elwingflight]

Science fiction is full of first contact stories, but is there a such thing as LAST contact?  Decide exactly what that means, and write about it.

[elwingflight]

Laughter and Mourning, the daughters of Húrin. (Originally posted on the SWG for the Orctober challenge prompt “eyes”.)

[elwingflight]

Night meeting sketch

[elwingflight]

i like when people say "how could you eat an innocent animal" because it implies it's okay to eat guilty animals

[elwingflight]

This is not real, that is a perfectly normal bobcat (they’re highly variable in color).

Also if this were real I hope someone would come up with a better name for the hybrid, that’s atrocious.

Bougar

[elwingflight]

Someone in my fb chicken group has a little bearded bantam that likes to sit on shoulders so they did a pirate photoshoot and I am losing it

Just look at it!! THE LITTLE HAT!!!