elwingflight

[elwingflight]

Newt is just 50% of current museum curators no need to get all old-timey about it

what’s funniest about the pacific rim scientists is like. when newt geiszler says he’s a scientist he means an old-timey 1910s entomologist wearing khaki shorts and a comically oversized pair of binoculars traipsing through the jungle capturing endangered species of butterfly and murmuring “egads!! fascinating…..” and scribbling it in his journal. when hermann gottlieb is being a scientist it’s literally the fucking manhattan project. tortured chainsmoking physicist. pawn of a war. repressed homosexual all his life. gets executed for being a communist. And they have to do each other’s peer review

[elwingflight]

i think you should be able to emoji react to MyChart lab results

[elwingflight]

Crazy deer 🤯🤯🤯

[elwingflight]

How do they choose which sand to be the glass and which sand to be the sand in an hourglass... Imagine you and your best friend were two grains of sand and you had to be in the hourglass and your bestie had to be the glass. Ur together but youve never been more apart. A Sick and twisted practice hourglassery is...

[elwingflight]

"I’m very concerned about my client’s right to a fair trial in this case.  He’s being prejudiced by some statements that are being made by government officials. Like every other defendant, he’s entitled to a presumption of innocence. But unfortunately the way this has been handled so far his rights are being violated. And as you know, Your Honor, there’s a wealth of case law guaranteeing his rights to a fair trial, but none of the safeguards have been put in place yet here — in fact it’s just the opposite of what’s been happening. 

He’s a young man, and he is being treated like a human pingpong ball between two warring jurisdictions here.

These federal and state prosecutors are coordinating with one another at the expense of him. They have conflicting theories in their indictment, and they are literally treating him like he is some sort of political fodder, like some sort of spectacle. 

He was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career. It was absolutely unnecessary. He’s been cooperative with law enforcement. He’d been in custody for over a week. He waived extradition. He was cooperative at all accounts. There was no reason for the NYPD and everybody to have these big assault rifles — that frankly I had no idea it was in their arsenal — and to have all the press there the media there. It was perfectly choreographed. 

And what was the New York City Mayor doing at this press conference, Your Honor? That just made it utterly political. And as your honor knows under Loro v. Charles, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has held it to be clearly established that these staged perp walks to the media unrelated to a legitimate law enforcement objective is unconstitutional. And I submit that there was zero law enforcement objective to do that sort of perp walk. There’s absolutely no need for that whatsoever. 

And frankly, Your Honor, the mayor should know more than anyone about the presumption of innocence that he, too, is afforded dealing with his own issues. And, frankly, I submit that he was just trying to detract from those issues by making a spectacle of Mr. Mangione. 

And there are consequences to this. 

He has a right to a fair trial. And I just want to put on the record statements that the mayor made publicly about my client. Nothing saying “alleged” for example. And he said “I wanted to send a strong message with the police commissioner that we’re leading from the front. I’m not just going to allow him to come into our city. I wanted to look him in the eye and state ‘You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city of New York that I love.’” And he wanted to show symbolism. 

Your Honor, he’s not a symbol. He’s somebody who is afforded the right to a fair trial. He’s innocent until proven guilty. And the mayor was talking to jurors — future potential jurors that elected him. Those are the people that elected him that he is talking to and calling this man a terrorist.

So, Your Honor, I just want to make a record of this and put everyone on notice that this has to stop, and my client is entitled to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence."

[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.