Coconuts have only been in the Caribbean for 500 years. They just….floated on over from Asia and took root. That’s…hilarious.
Wait really? I always thought they were if not native at least brought over on purpose
Right??? I’m watching this nature doc and when the narrator said that I nearly spit my drink giggling. They’re remarkably buoyant and just bob their way to a new shore. So carefree. Truly a fruit destined to be in the Caribbean.
The more I think about it the more I realise that no ancient civilization would be at all interested in taming dragons.
Dragons are carnivores, so they’re really inefficient and costly to feed. They’re solitary, so its really frigging hard to form any kind of relationship with them. They’re darn right dangerous, so why risk your life taming one when there’s loads of llamas in the world. And worst of all their life spans are insanely long; if you had an opportunity to breed one, you wouldn’t live long enough to see the fruit of your labour mature, so you wouldn’t even bother.
‘BABY BOOMER TAMES DRAGON. REFUSES TO BREED IT. SAYS “MILLENIALS SHOULD BE SATISFIED WITH LLAMAS” DOES A SICK LOOP-DE-LOOP ON BACK OF DRAGON’
Not sure I’d agree with that, since cats are obligate carnivores and became domesticated. Seems like it would depend more on the size of the dragon in question.
Also, being reptiles, I think they’d actually be less expensive to feed than a carnivorous mammals since reptilian metabolisms tend to be slower, which is why snakes and lizards can go a very long time between meals if the food happens to be big enough.
Oh cats and dogs are most certainly carnivores, but they happen to also be pack animals, relatively safe to interact with, and have an ideal maturation rate and brood size for breading. They manage to tick some boxes which make them legitimate for domesticating.
Elephants come to mind as something less than ideal to tame that humans just, decided to tame anyway. Their maturation rate is crazy long and elephants can kill. But they are herbivores, making them deceptively cheep to feed for their size (Well, relatively, big herbivores are expensive to feed, but at least you’re paying to only feed it, not every big herbivore it ever eats) and Elephants are SUPER sociable. But even so, Elephants aren’t the most popular in terms of domestication.
Dragons meanwhile have so very little qualities which would make them good for domestication. (Being really freaking cool, terrifying in battle, and useful for travel are good incentives to try to domesticate a dragon, but it doesn’t mean an industry of domesticating them is going to be plausible.)
You’ve got me on the reptile metabolism thing. I don’t know enough about that topic to discuss it.
cats only became more sociable through domestication. so if u could domesticate a dragon having a giant animal to fly u and things long distance would be very valuable, and even though they take a long time to grow if they are passed down thru families they could be valuable
They could be bred to be more sociable through rapid selective breeding. Which is why if dragons had to be domesticated I’d choose the game of thrones ones because holy flip that dragon is an adult and only five years old. But cats were sociable to begin with, they live in prides; it’s in their nature to socialise, so humans could get all up in that.
A dragon pet being valuable doesn’t overcome a dragon being plausible. I’m sure some dragon fanatics who have the wealth, land, and disposable people to domesticate one dragon would occasionally manage to, but not civilisations.
I’m sure one guy who really loves the abstract idea of heritage would put the effort into breeding their dragon so that their great great grand daughter could have a dragon too, but there’s nothing to say that grand daughter will feel the same way about a load of descendents she’s never going to meet.
Dragons will be for the super rich fanatics, civisiations would have to make do with drawings of their kings riding them.
I’d like to point out that the “low metabolism” thing is bunk.
Dragons (as described here) would be flying animals. Giant flying animals. Giant flying animals that breathe fire. Flight is the single most costly mode of transportation ever evolved by a huge margin; birds on the wing use about 7 times the energy that they use while at rest. By comparison, we humans only use less than twice our “resting energy” while walking. As is expected, these ratios increase with an animal’s size. A dragon large enough to carry a human is gonna need a FRICKEN LOT of energy to be able to fly at all, which requires a fast metabolism to provide (yes, even if it doesn’t fly very much).
Secondly, fire. How would they produce it? They sure wouldn’t breathe fire just by thinking “burny” thoughts, and the flames most dragons are depicted as producing are strong and persistent which isn’t consistent with the common “gas bladder” explanation given by many. This suggests the production of liquid fuel, a method of ignition, and more importantly a way to throw that fuel far enough for the dragon to hit things without burning itself alive. I don’t know how it’s gonna accomplish those things, but I guarantee you that it ain’t gonna be cheap. The fuel alone would require so many kilocalories, like you wouldn’t believe how many KCs are in a napalm-like fuel, like holy crap. It’s gonna need a TON of food to produce that.
So, yeah, reptile or not, a dragon would definitely need way more food to stay alive and do dragony things than a non-dragon critter of similar size. Unless you’re a monarch who doesn’t particularly care how starving your subjects are, dragon domestication is a no-no.
^ I was thinking that while reading this post
get these dragon taming elitists of my dash
I’m glad dragons aren’t real; the dragon fandom would suck all the fun out of them.
consider this. they’re magical animals that work by magic. its the only explanation for why any thing about them makes sense. for one thing, for anything at that size to get airborn under normal circumstances, the size its wings would need to be is absurd and impractical. they work by magic becuase they’re inherently magical creatures. no one asks how a unicorn has healing powers becuase they’re understood to be magical
Screw magic. Also screw carnivore dragons.
Omnivore dragons.
A dragon marauds into an area and eats all the livestock, sure, but there’s also crops, trees, plants, houses, etc. Why should dragons just eat all the sheep in an area when they can break the grain silo open and go to town? Devastate a year’s worth of harvests then try to waddle away because they’re too fat to fly (like a gorged vulture).
Even “carnivores” like bears and wolves will eat fruit, nuts, grass, things, etc because it’s easier than chasing down prey. Why restrict dragons? Why insist dragons are too discerning?
Omnivore dragons ftw.
That’s a point. What’s the benefit of being strictly a carnivore anyway? Digesting things becomes a lot easier, but dragons are BIG, they should have room for enough stomachs to eat just, all the trees.
Simply put, the benefit of being a hypercarnivore (having a diet comprised 70% or greater of animals) is indeed that digesting things becomes a lot easier.
Foraging is a very expensive activity. To make the investment of food-collection worthwhile, an animal needs returns on whatever it eats that outweigh that investment. Cows eat grass, need to spend pretty much all of their time grazing just to turn an energetic profit, and their lifestyle is hardly a fast-paced one. Cheetahs, on the other hand, eat tasty tasty dead things only every once in a while, and theirs is the most fast-paced life of any terrestrial vertebrate. The tradeoff is that they can’t afford to do anything but rest while they’re not foraging.
Back to the issue at hand, why should a dragon be strictly carnivorous? Let’s look at the numbers: A pound of grain (in this case wheat) has about 1,500 kilocalories of available energy, while a pound of classic Dragon Food (sheepies!) only has about 1300. From just this, the argument for the “omnivorous harvestfucker” dragon is pretty convincing! However, lean meat is not the only component of sheep. They’re also full of tasty fat (3500 KCal/lb) and bone marrow (3500 KCal/lb).
Assuming your average sheep weighs ~150 pounds and has a median bodyfat content of ~15%, a hungry dragon can expect to net a whopping 275000 kilocalories from a single animal. Compare that to the 225000 kilocalories from a similar mass of grain. It may not seem like much, but when you’re a massive hypercarnivore that 50 million calorie difference is a huge motivator.
So while I’m not completely opposed to the idea of omnivorous dragons, I’d wager that if they existed they’d be eyeing the waddling balls of penned mutton more often than fortified grain silos.
Dragons taming humans makes much more sense.
Yes, but all this feeding talk is completely redundant if you can’t catch and pen one to begin with.
Like, look at buffaloes. They’re grazing animals that produce meat and fur that can, and historically has, been used for food and shelter. And yet, they have only very recently been domesticated. Not because ancient people didn’t want to domesticate them, but because they couldn’t. Buffaloes are huge and they will attack you if you mess. It’d be like being attacked by a steamroller.
That’s the same reason why we’ve never domesticated lions or tigers or bears (oh my). As cool as it would be to ride a friggin’ war bear into battle, they’re just not good for domestication to get your war bear in the first place. When you just have a stick with a pointy rock on one end, maybe a sheet of metal covering your torso, and more gumption than is good for you and your going up against something at least twice your size with daggers attached to each of its toes and no problem attacking you to defend itself, your not gonna win.
Dragons, in most depictions, are big as houses with diamond hard scales, have claws the size of people, and, in many stories, have human like intelligence (which brings up a moral aspect to domestication). Oh yeah, and they can fly.
Maybe the odds of achieving a capture of one would be plausible now in modern times where we have the technology to match their power, but in medieval times, you can get a group of fifty of the strongest warriors to try and catch one, but the only thing you can be guaranteed is that most of them will die in the process, assuming that the dragon doesn’t just fly off to begin with, in which the warriors would have no way of following. And then, assuming by some miracle they do manage to catch one, they still have to catch a second one for breeding. And after the lose of life capturing the first one, you’ll be hard pressed to find people willing to go after a second one.
The only way around that is if your dragons are no bigger than horses
with little natural protection
to begin with and then you breed them into the large powerhouses you see in stories (that’s what they did in the Pern novels by Anne Mccaffrey).
And then you’ve got the dragons with human like intelligence. There’s no domesticating them, because then it’s slavery. But, alliances can be brokered with them, which means awesome dragon societies.
But wait, there is a third option here. Dragons (of the non-human like intelligence variety) do like cats did and domesticate themselves.
Because why bother stealing food from the humans when you can just get the humans to willingly give the food to you. You might have to do a bit of guard work for them or let them ride on your back or go attack other humans for them, but in return you get fed choice meals, get better places to sleep in beside a cave (that will increasingly improve with human technology), have a safe place away from predators to have your eggs, have that hard to reach spot scratched for you whenever it gets itchy, and just over all have a more secure life than you would’ve trying to survive on your own in the wild.
In short, if you watch over the sheepies and protect them from predators and thieves for a few hours, you will get to eat some of the sheepies in reward, which takes a lot less effort than trying to steal them yourself.
Because quite frankly, one of the best survival techniques for non-humans is to be useful to humans. Because we are super clingy that way.
Research from University of Tokyo can display unique physical properties using persistence of vision:
Phyxel is a realistic display that makes a desired physical object
appear at spatially pixelated locations. The created image appears to be
essentially real and can be manipulated, like a virtual image. Toward
the realization of Phyxel, it is essential to closely coordinate the
lighting and motion for the perceptual reality. In the developed system,
we manipulate the motion of various objects at high speed and control
their perceived locations by projecting a computed lighting pattern
using a 1000-fps 8-bit high-speed projector.
We can utilize this novel visual media in various fields, such as
entertainment, digital signage, design industry, exhibition, and so on.
I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?
Nim Chimpsky.
Fucking monkey pun.
And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But
BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.
Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.
There’s a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization… they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one “sonic hedgehog” because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.
Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child’s lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a “sonic hedgehog mutation”.
And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.
Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this cycle “the ferrous wheel”. We groaned about that for at least five solid minutes.
You should see some (most) of the acronyms astronomers come up with. These acronyms appear in refereed journal articles, press releases, presentations…
One of the best examples is dark matter. The competing theories: MACHOs and WIMPs. Article titles include “WIMPs Wimp Out in the Search for Dark Matter” and something along the lines of “WIMPS Flexes its BICEPs” (I unfortunately cannot find the original article right now)
I know there are astronomers who are thinking about possible press releases when coming up with an acronym for their simulation/telescope/instrument/survey
Here’s a sample of some creative ones (including how did you get away with this and what were you thinking submissions)
2D-FRUTTI ARMPIT ASS (not listed in the above link) BEER BOOMERanG COME ON+ GADZOOKS! (yes, the exclamation point is meant to be included) GANDALF HIS/HERS HO-BAGS (really!?) Hot DOGs (not listed in the above link) LUCIFER MARTINI MERLIN MIRLIN PINTofALE POOPSY SAURON SCARFACE TANGOinPARIS T-RECS WISARD WISEASS WOMBAT YORIC and so, so much more
People have this idea that scientists are these sombre, sensible people, but honestly basically no one in science can be trusted to act with even a modicum of dignity.
I had a lecture this morning about using transgenic plants to create therapeutic antibodies on a large scale for medical purposes, with greater output and less risk than using mammalian cell-lines: Plantibodies. This is pretty much the standard term for them now.
Last term I learnt about a gene called TMM that causes multiple stomata to form together, stands for “Too Many Mouths”. Not “Too Many Stomata”, not “Bunched” or “Clustered” Stomata nope, “Too Many Mouths”.
Chloroplasts and mitochondria have double membranes around them, and paired, transport protein complexes that allow things to pass through them. In mitochondria these were names Translocation of the Inner Membrane proteins and Translocation of the Outer Membrane proteins…the TIM/TOM complex. When, someone discovered an equivalent for chloroplasts they decided to name them TIC and TOC because it’s sensible and certainly not as some huge joke.
There’s an Arabidopsis mutant that causes excess stamens (male organs) to develop on the flowers: Superman. An antagonistic gene was discovered, and there’s no prizes for working out that it got named Kryptonite.
The gene JAK – retconned to “Janus Kinase” for publication, but originally stood for “Just Another Kinase.” “Cleopatra – The Cleopatra mutation is lethal only if Asp is also present.
“ “tinman – the mutant has no heart.”
And the taxonomists are even worse. There’s a genus of snail called Turbo. Balbaroo fangaroo is a fossil kangaroo with large canines (fangaroo, urgh). “Diastolinus this and D. that Steiner, 2006 (darkling beetles) “The specific name ’this’ is from the Greek word meaning ‘shore’ or ‘beach’ in reference to the habitat of the beetle… .” D. that is named for the English pronoun, because it is found further away (inland) from D. this. [Zootaxa 1158: 24-29.]
“
A protein in the RISC complex (oh yeah, folk just love catchy acronyms) was named R2D2 for moderately sensible reasons. When another protein was found that formed a part of this complex it was immediately named C3P0 of course.
I feel like after a series of long, awkward moments where everyone’s just staring in disappointment at a perfectly ordinary lizard, eventually someone would be like “…you know what, do we have any Dimetrodon DNA lying around? Let’s just borrow the back spines and add it to the longisquama genome and nobody has to know”
A Time for Destiny: The Illustrious Career of Serenity Starlight Warhammer O’James during her First Three Years in the Space Fighters
The term “Mary Sue” has been thrown around a lot recently, mostly for characters it doesn’t really apply to. The term originates in a very specific fan fiction context, and in my opinion there are usually much better approaches to use for media criticism for works outside that context. Dismissing a character as a “Mary Sue” is a muddled way to approach a film character.
Unless you’re intentionally trying to evoke self-indulgent fan fiction.
In which case, welcome to the rabbit hole, Alice.
For NaNoGenMo 2015, Cat’s Eye Technologies decided to create a computer generated novel that doesn’t succumb to Michael Cook’s more unpredictable stuff. The goal was to create a novel where the reader doesn’t lose interest because of the generative nature of the text. On the other hand, the MARYSUE generator was never intended to write good novels, just legible ones. Which is still a pretty lofty goal.
The generator is intentionally cast in the mode of an overwrought but inexperienced author. Which actually matches the abilities of the generator rather well: the author really is an immature adolescent struggling to get an exciting story down on paper while jumping between cool imagery and overly specific details about the things the author is obsessed with. Just, in this case, the author happens to be an adolescent robot.
In doing so, we can start to point out the parts of the stories that work and can start to see what the author was trying to go for and maybe even be able to figure out how to help the author say them better–just as we might be able to respond to a young fan fiction author who is working out their feelings about the source material by writing a story in response.
Beyond choosing a frame that matches the abilities of the generator, the output itself is fairly sophisticated for a machine-written text. It’s based on the idea of a story compiler that looks for plot events and expands them into more detailed events.
also. there’s a scene right off the bat where an important thing gets stolen and the fic’s going through listing off everybody’s reactions, and then we hit:
Joe Mulbury picked up the cup of coffee that was nearby. He held the cup
of coffee in his hand. “This cup of coffee represents how I feel
inside,” he said heavily.
and then that’s just a random recurringthing.
this is my new response to everything. I’m making this a meme.
have i told you guys about the time that i classically conditioned my kindergarten class
I got like 4 anons asking about this so I guess I didn’t:
omg. okay, so basically, I was a “gifted kid” which was code for fucken nerd ass bitch, so i would constantly just stare off into space during class while everyone else was tryna figure out what the fuck our teacher was tryna say. Anyway, I was learning about chemistry and biology outside of school(i know what a fucking nerd amirite ladies), and my dad got me a book that talked about all these famous psychological experiments.
So chapter one was, would you have guessed it, Pavlov’s dog. I thought it my be fun to try something to that extent with my classmates. Now, keep in mind, being a nerdy ass brown kid in a school full of white ppl meant that I wasn’t exactly popular, and no one really talked to me in class or cared what I was doing.
Everyday, at 9:45 am, our teacher would announce that it was snacktime, and everyone would fucking sprint to their cubbies to grab their lunchboxes like it was the goddamn hunger games. Kindergarten kids didn’t really have a concept of time, so i used this to my advantage. At 9:45 as my teacher would walk up to announce snacktime, I would knock on my desk really quickly three times. It was rly subtle, and I wasn’t sure that it would work.
So after two or three weeks, I decided to have some fun. Thirty minutes after school began at like 8:30 or something, I tapped knocked on the desk. Half the class turned their heads and looked straight at the cubbies. 3 boys got up and were about to run to get their lunchbox. One girls stomach started growling REALLY loudly. The teacher had to take 5 minutes to get everyone to calm down and one kid started crying because he thought it was snacktime and he was so shocked and destroyed.
Realizing that I had basically dog trained the whole class, I burst out laughing so hard I fell out of my chair and cut my head on the tile floor and got sent home early because I was laughing so hard they thought I had a concussion or something. When I explained what happened to my dad he left the room, but I could hear him losing it in the hallway.
So everytime now that I learn about classical conditioning in my Neuroscience classes, I have to fight to keep a straight face
Science Combat is a series of GIFs that transforms legendary scientists into fighting game characters, with special moves inspired by their discoveries
and inventions. It was designed by the Brazilian illustrator Diego Sanches for Superinteressante magazine. Here are my favourites:
This Is a Backup Blog 