bubbly

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I’m so√﹀\_︿╱﹀╲/╲︿_/︺╲▁︹_/﹀\_︿╱▔︺\/\︹▁╱﹀▔╲︿_/︺▔╲▁︹_/﹀▔\⁄﹀\╱﹀▔︺\︹▁︿╱\╱﹀▔╲︿_/︺▔\︿╱\︿︹_/▔﹀\_︿╱▔︺\︹╱﹀▔╲︿_/︺▔\╱﹀╲▁︹_/﹀\_︿╱▔︺\︹▁︿⁄╲︿╱﹀╲

hey has anyone seen my potion that turns you into the dow jones

Your wha\ | | | | | | | \_

this company is so frustratingly misleading. They did not bring back the direwolf (Aenocyon dirus). They modified a modern grey wolf (Canis lupus) into having some direwolf morphology. There has been no de-extinction. This is pure hype slop. As a friend said "these are dire wolves the same way La Croix is a fruit".

I still think this tech has the potential to be helpful in a conservation context.... but it says a A LOT that these "dire wolves" look far more like something you'd see in Game of Thrones than any of the most likely reconstructions proposed by scientists who've studied the fossil record.

These pups might get more robust as they age, but right now I'm not seeing anything to get excited about. I just can't help but suspect that this species was chosen specifically bc the public already has the idea of "dire wolf = gray wolf + big", and that this company is using relatively minor CRISPR editing to give the false impression that they're recreating anything that might have conceivably lived 10,000 years ago.

Again, I think this tech is interesting and merits further development (and if jurassic park is the only way they can do that, then, I guess that's what's happening), but it's still extremely misleading to parade these animals around like they've actually 100% cloned a dire wolf.

Really reminds me of Jurassic Park. In the books, Crichton made it very clear that they didn't actually clone dinosaurs. They just combined DNA to make an animal that looked like what people EXPECT a dinosaur to look like, because it turned out that actual cloned dinosaurs were really quite dull and spent most of their time hiding.

Aencyon dirus isn't closely related to modern wolves at all either so it doesn't make any sense to start with a gray wolf. (According to wikipedia they were isolated from the gray wolf lineage for over 5 million years.) we thought they were in genus Canis but turns out it was just convergent evolution and they are a whole other thing

now that I actually read the article, I realize that the lede was buried-- they genetically modified this wolf, and they also cloned 4 critically endangered red wolves

I think the TIME article is really irresponsible in acting like the pups are dire wolves when they don't contain any dire wolf DNA. The "dire wolf" pups are literally just gray wolve engineered to look more like the creatures on Game of Thrones (literally--one of the pups is named Khaleesi)

I remain cautiously optimistic though, because it seems like they are doing actually useful research for preserving existing animals and then putting a Jurassic Park type spin on it for the media.

The Dire wolf thing honestly might just be an attention-grabber to get money off of people that know nothing about ecosystems, and the red wolf might be the actual real purpose of the research. If they've figured out the genetic basis of body size and certain "wolfy" behaviors in wolves, they could make it possible to bring coyote-red wolf hybrids into the red wolf breeding pool without sacrificing the wolf traits

Y'all, just think about guys like Elon Musk. Rich tech bros with a 5 yr old boy's idea of what is cool. This stuff is perfectly calibrated to siphon off some of those techbro's billions, while on the side, being helpful to conservation

Just look at the traits of the altered pups that are highlighted in the article: snout, jaw and limb thickness and heaviness, vocalizations, body size. All key traits that separate red wolves and coyotes.

Here's what the article says:

They're using this technology to bring genetic diversity from red wolf/coyote hybrids back into the red wolf gene pool. As soon as I read "red wolves" I suspected this might be what was happening, and I was right. This could help fix the genetic bottleneck in red wolves and make a real chance for the species to actually return.

this approach is honestly genius

It's like those researchers who have made huge strides in lake ecology with funding they get by "searching for the Loch Ness Monster"

yup exactly

just a quick search of this Bridgett vonHoldt demonstrates that she is a BIG DEAL in the world of canine evolution and genomics. she's worked on groundbreaking publications that have hundreds of citations in some of the most renowned scientific journals. She's the real deal.

whether Colossal is serious and knowledgeable or not, they're working with people who are.

There's a lot of furious people in the notes who clearly did not read the article because they are yelling "THEY COULD BE USING THIS TECHNOLOGY TO SAVE CRITICALLY ENDANGERED RED WOLVES"

Well you see, that's exactly what they're doing

I'm not happy with the confusion caused by calling the modified gray wolf a dire wolf, it further obscures what dire wolves actually were with Game of thrones pop culture bullshit. But I think that it's a solid strategy for sucking up the money of rich idiots who wouldnt otherwise care about animals

reverse gaslighting where i pretend to know exactly what you are talking about

academic conferences

Work meetings

Interviews

Auditory processing disorder

conversations with my cats who are yelling

Me letting that little kid with their hyper fixation tell me every single fact they know about it

Goncharov (1973)

one of the most fucked up aspects of being an adult is really how life-goes-on everything is. like you can be dealing with the most fucked up trauma-drama-grief and still have to sleep and eat food to survive and like. poop. pooping while you're really sad shouldn't be a thing but it is. we don't have a say in the matter. life goes on

i never thought i’d write the words “deeply evil carpet” but. seriously. what a deeply evil carpet that is.

I think one of Pratchett's great skills in writing was being able to make silly things serious, in different ways. Like, there's a fairy godmother forcing everyone into fairystales, how fun! Except in the process, she has stopped seeing them as people. She's forcing people to live lives they don't want to because she decides that's how it has to be. Sometimes she goes so far as to violate her victim's minds and deform and puppet their bodies so they'll play their part right, and anyone who doesn't do their job gets mercilessly killed. And there's a zombie activist named Reg Shoe who buries himself every year out of solidarity for the dead, how funny! Except he is filled with a genuine passion for justice and improvement in the world, and that's why he literally refuses to die. And he buries himself on a holiday that happens to be the anniversery of his own death, and he does it next to the bodies of the friends and strangers he fought alongside, the ones who didn't get to come back, so he spends one day with them. There is still a lot of silliness in discworld, a lot that's wacky and funny, but a lot of it, when you think about it, is oddly beautiful or touching or disturbing or something else entirely.

Discworld Heritage Post

is it a good sign if the president is sephiroth posting after hurling his own country into what might just become its worst economic state in its modern history

tfw the hellhound doesn't show up

We need a holiday for this, a day where we stop and recognize all the things that didn't kill us. Could work like a passover seder

Light a nice-smelling candle for all the air pollution that we don't breathe in and the fires that never burned out of control, eat a nice meal with unpoisoned food and drink our clean water. Fly paper airplanes in honor of all the plane crashes that don't happen.

➸ “This is a sentence.”

➸ “This is a sentence with a dialogue tag at the end,” she said.

➸ “This,” he said, “is a sentence split by a dialogue tag.”

➸ “This is a sentence,” she said. “This is a new sentence. New sentences are capitalized.”

➸ “This is a sentence followed by an action.” He stood. “They are separate sentences because he did not speak by standing.”

➸ She said, “Use a comma to introduce dialogue. The quote is capitalized when the dialogue tag is at the beginning.”

➸ “Use a comma when a dialogue tag follows a quote,” he said.

“Unless there is a question mark?” she asked.

“Or an exclamation point!” he answered. “The dialogue tag still remains uncapitalized because it’s not truly the end of the sentence.”

➸ “Periods and commas should be inside closing quotations.”

➸ “Hey!” she shouted, “Sometimes exclamation points are inside quotations.”

However, if it’s not dialogue exclamation points can also be “outside”!

➸ “Does this apply to question marks too?” he asked.

If it’s not dialogue, can question marks be “outside”? (Yes, they can.)

➸ “This applies to dashes too. Inside quotations dashes typically express—“

“Interruption” — but there are situations dashes may be outside.

➸ “You’ll notice that exclamation marks, question marks, and dashes do not have a comma after them. Ellipses don’t have a comma after them either…” she said.

➸ “My teacher said, ‘Use single quotation marks when quoting within dialogue.’”

➸ “Use paragraph breaks to indicate a new speaker,” he said.

“The readers will know it’s someone else speaking.”

➸ “If it’s the same speaker but different paragraph, keep the closing quotation off.

“This shows it’s the same character continuing to speak.”

omg this is so helpful

!!!!!!!

Do I have too many books? No. It is my shelving methods that are inadequate

Remember the time we weren't obsessed with that man? Yeah, me either...

Me rn:

Brief moment of horror at work bc I forgot what I named my phone for a sec

shit ton of people are repeating the thing about hayao miyazaki saying AI art is an "insult to life itself" and just as a reminder he was talking about the zombies that team made that were intended to be scary in how much they shook, but instead reminded him of his disabled friend. the insult to life itself was referring to the team trying to make scary real symptoms that people live with.

it was a quote about ableism. if he has said other things about AI type stuff, that is a different thing. but that specific quote was about ableism.

this is the full quote.

His actual answer to AI is this which is just a few seconds after the insult to life speech. [source]