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same as it ever was
  • Our ancestors' brains went from chimpanzee-sized to modern-sized (actually slightly bigger than today) between two million and one million years ago, and more importantly the language-governing areas increased in size during that stretch. So human beings a million years ago were very much like us today, just without the advanced technology.

  • same as it ever was
  • I always liked how archaeologists would dig up ancient statues of big-breasted and big-butted women and call them evidence of a "cult of fertility". I guess that sounds better than "porn".

  • He's not really gonna get rid of the ACA right?
  • As a school bus driver, I work with a bunch of older people who are already utterly dependent on social security and medicare to have any semblance of a life that doesn't involve living in a tent in the park and dumpster diving for dinner. They are mostly trumpers. We're all Teamsters as well, and a few are married lesbians (and these are the most rabidly pro-trump of all). I have made a few attempts to convince them that trump (and Republicans for fucking decades) are out to destroy social security, medicare, unions and gay rights (among lots of other things) - but they reacted to me like I had grown an extra head. Somehow they've convinced themselves that the GOP is the original source and the protector of these things.

  • Know thy enemy
  • Fun fact: through the 1800s coal-powered steamships mostly replaced sailing vessels for the transportation of people and time-sensitive cargo around the world. But steamships were highly inefficient and required frequent re-coaling, and locally available coal was dirtier and contained less thermal energy than the good stuff that Britain (who was doing by far most of the shipping) got from Wales and other places on their island. Because steamships could not efficiently and cheaply haul the coal that they needed around the world to restock the coaling stations, this was done instead by an enormous fleet of sailing colliers. So the "steam revolution" of the 1800s was actually a steam/wind-power hybrid. It wasn't until the advent of triple- and quadruple-expansion steam engines, turbines, and greatly improved boilers in the early 1900s that steam-powered vessels could efficiently and economically haul their own fuel. And even with that, wind-powered cargo vessels remained economically viable and operating in significant numbers right up until the start of WWII (that's II, not I).

    A great read is The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby, about his time as a sailor aboard Moshulu (a large steel sail-powered cargo ship) in 1938-1939. Moshulu went on to star in The Godfather Part II as the ship which brings young Vito Corleone to New York, and is now weirdly enough a floating restaurant in my city of Philadelphia (I've never eaten there but I want to).

  • Houses in my area increases 82% in just 4 years
  • grey vinyl flooring

    I hate that shit even more than I hated the fake wood paneling and shag carpet of the '70s. I bought a house last year that had the grey vinyl flooring in the living room and I've tried my hardest to fuck it up during the renovation so I have to replace it, but unfortunately it holds up to extreme abuse pretty well.

  • Locked
    Republicans spent years demanding Hunter Biden's laptop, shooting up pizza places, and harassing trans people. Yet shrug at Epstein and Trump.
  • Yesterday I watched some lady hand-wave away Trump’s actions by saying “we’re all sinners, and trump deserves our forgiveness just like we deserve Jesus’ forgiveness”.

    A couple of weeks ago I watched fucking John Fetterman make essentially the same argument, saying that we shouldn't harp on Trump's status as a convicted felon because Democrats are supposed to be "the party of forgiveness and redemption". It's hard to watch (some, not all) Democrat leaders falling over themselves in their attempts to give away political advantage.

  • title
  • If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
    If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
    If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
    If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it

    Edit: before any nerds weigh in, I know that's not ring mail.

  • Drop your most "wtf that's not how the world works" from movies/tv shows.
  • while Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t

    Larry Niven wrote a great essay many years ago about the physical realities of being Superman. My favorite bit was about how him having sex with Lois Lane would have resulted in her head being blown off.

  • Drop your most "wtf that's not how the world works" from movies/tv shows.
  • Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft

    My favorite part of Empire Strikes Back was when Luke takes his (presumably) short-range interceptor X-Wing and flies it to another star system to hang with Yoda. I dunno, maybe canon explained this one somewhere (was Yoda's planet in the same star system as Hoth or something? are X-Wings capable of FTL travel for no reason?).

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)CH
    ChickenLadyLovesLife @lemmy.world
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