And some of those same scientists later organized a mass slaughter of thousands of platypuses in order to determine if the stories about them were true. Science, bitches!

Fun uranium facts: during WWII, one method that the Manhattan Project used to refine uranium (i.e. separate U235 from natural uranium which is mostly non-fissile U238) relied on magnetism. A charged particle moving through a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to the direction of motion, which makes it follow a slightly curved path instead of a straight line. This force is the same for both U235 and U238 but since U235 weighs slightly less, its path is slightly more curved. By charging particles of natural uranium and shooting them through a powerful magnetic field, separate collectors can be set up to gather the U235 particles.

Creating the magnetic field required powerful electromagnets. Normally these would have used copper wire but copper was a valuable strategic metal needed for much of the other military hardware the US was producing, so the Manhattan Project “checked out” the United States’ reserves of silver to build the magnets. For good measure, the electricity for the magnets came mostly from the hydroelectric dams built as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority projects of the 1930s (this is mainly why the Manhattan Project’s uranium processing facilities were located in Oak Ridge). These dams were originally meant to power the production of aluminum, but the US had plenty of other sources for that.

Throughout US history, all of our battleships have been named after states, except for one: USS Kearsarge. The original ship of this name during the Civil War hunted down and sank the confederate raider Alabama and since that time the US Navy has ensured that one commissioned ship always has that name, I guess as a giant lasting “fuck you” to the confederacy. The battleship Kearsarge was commissioned in 1900, ruining an otherwise-perfect ship naming convention.

For this reason I support making Puerto Rico into a state - as long as they change their name to Kearsarge first.

Quest Diagnostics.

Impersonate a masque

Macaque?

I used to hang with some behavioral psychology grad students (the type that follow the practices of B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning) who were researching the effects of various drugs on pigeons. We were drinking in their lab one time and there were about thirty white pitchers sitting on a table; eventually I noticed that they all had little white, twitching tails sticking out of them - each one contained a pigeon face-down waiting to be put into the testing chamber. I asked them how they managed to get the pigeons into the pitchers and keep them there and they just laughed. They took me into the cage room and showed me how they just opened the cage door and held up a pitcher and the bird would fly like a rocket straight into it. Sometimes they went in so hard they would knock themselves unconscious.

There are some obvious ethical issues with animal experimentation, but as a certified druggie myself their lives didn’t seem all that bad.

One of the most insane commercials I’ve seen lately is for Rocket Mortgage. It features some schlub walking towards his house carrying two bags of groceries while the narrator says something about how the two bags of groceries used to be four bags. Then the house starts talking to him, telling him he can turn his equity in the house into cash (thanks to Rocket Mortgage) which he could then use for groceries. The thought that there are people out there who are so financially illiterate that they think borrowing money to pay for fucking groceries is a good idea is genuinely depressing.

For good measure, one of the bags of groceries has purple heads of garlic on a stalk sticking out of it - which makes me think the whole thing was generated by AI.

I’ve been feeding my local crows roasted peanuts for a couple of years now. Selfish fuckers refuse to murder my enemies. Won’t even shit on their cars.

In Paleoanthropology these days, you will not find an article about a hominid fossil discovery that doesn’t include some variant of the phrase “forcing Anthropologists to rethink their assumptions”. This all derives from the “Lucy” find that truly did force Anthropologists to rethink their assumptions. Before Lucy, it was assumed that the two most unique aspects of humans - our big brains and our bipedal locomotion - evolved together, but the fact that the 3.9 myo Lucy (since revised to 3.3 myo) was fully bipedal despite having a chimpanzee-sized brain threw this assumption out the window. The career successes of her discoverers and analysts prompted everyone else who finds a bit of thigh bone to make similar claims of significance, despite the fact that no other discovery has had any real earth-shattering significance like that.

No fraud but just massive overstating of importance.

I’m a retired programmer and the only time I faced a situation where a PhD (or Master’s) would have made any difference was when I worked for a company that was involved with defense contractors. In this situation we had a pay scale where the hourly rate at which we were billable to the client was based on our degree, something like $110/hr for a bachelor’s, $140/hr for a Master’s and $185/hr for a PhD. The fun part was that it didn’t matter at all what field the advanced degree was in, so if I’d finished my Anthropology PhD way back when it would have meant I was billable at a much higher rate and correspondingly worth a much higher salary to my employer, despite its complete irrelevance to the actual tasks I faced.

We had a number of absolutely useless employees with PhDs who nevertheless brought in a lot more revenue than I did. It turned out later that some of the PhDs were made up - they had just put it on their resumes and nobody ever checks that shit. FWIW we also had a bunch of retired Air Force colonels on staff and nobody expected them to even show up to work on a regular basis. The corruption in that sector of the economy is just massive.

I learned it while at the same time learning (or really enhancing my previous knowledge of) javascript, thanks to an insane mostly-Finnish app development platform known as Qt Creator, which for no rational reason uses C++ for the under-hood-stuff and javascript for the UI front end. Just an absolutely horrible mismatch of mental states. For bonus points, the company that I worked for that used this monstrosity for its suite of apps got purchased by a huge west coast company and the apps were shut down and everybody was fired, after two years of my working on this shit.

Not the song I mean, but thanks for the ear worm.

A couple of good books on the subject:

How the Earth Turned Green (most relevant)
Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds

Here are some modern-day variants of mosses that don’t even look like what we typically think of as “moss”.

You just ruined the song.

It was a lot more fun to believe that coal was crushed dinosaurs.

FWIW a lot of “moss” from that time was very unlike what we think of as moss today.

There’s a scene in The Thin Red Line where a squad of American soldiers are lying in grass with Japanese machine-gun bullets flying all around them, and Adrian Brody’s character notices an interesting flower next to him and starts poking at it with a real look of appreciation on his face.

I remember a product from years ago with the phrase “Genuine Placebo Effect” on the label. Wish I could remember what it was.

The real power of this kind of thought control is its ability to govern people’s thoughts and behaviors when nobody else is around.