Can you imagine being the, I’m going to go out on a limb and say grad student, who had to dress up like a car seat and drive a car around pretending to be a self-driving car?
Like, I can imagine someone deciding to just do this for a lark, but this guy was doing it for science.
In life he was big, ugly and full of attitude – no wonder scientists chose to name the ferocious Jurassic crocodile after Lemmy.
Like the hell-raising Motorhead frontman who died in 2015, the six-metre long beast dubbed Lemmysuchus was no stranger to trouble.
The monster that terrorised coastal waters around the UK more than 145 million years ago had a skull measuring just over a metre and large, blunt teeth perfect for crushing bones and turtle shells.
A fossil skeleton of one of the creatures was dug up in a clay pit near Peterborough in 1909 and then housed at London’s Natural History Museum.
After conducting a recent study of the specimen, University of Edinburgh palaeontologist Michela Johnson realised it had been wrongly classified and needed a new scientific name.
The suggestion to honour heavy metal bass player Lemmy came from Natural History Museum curator and Motorhead fan Lorna Steel.
“Although Lemmy passed away at the end of 2015, we’d like to think that he would have raised a glass to Lemmysuchus, one of the nastiest sea creatures to have ever inhabited the Earth,” she said.
“As a long-standing Motorhead fan I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to immortalise the rock star in this way.”
Lemmysuchus belonged to an extinct group of reptiles called teleosaurs, which were distantly related to today’s crocodiles.
It would have been one of the largest coastal predators of its time.
“It can be difficult to identify new species as we are normally working with incomplete fossil skeletons,” Johnson, a PhD student, said.
“Following careful anatomical comparison, and by referring to the main specimen held at the Natural History Museum, we could see that most of the previous finds were actually from relatives of Lemmysuchus rather than the species itself, and we were able to assign a new name.”
The new description of Lemmysuchus, which translates as “Lemmy’s crocodile”, appears in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
Yeah! XD (although I don’t like the calling him Ugly part, shush you!)
I believe in rehabilitative justice first and foremost because I was in a cult.
Yeah, I talk a lot about my liberal pacifist upbringing and my community’s condemnation of Middle East invasion shaping my relationship to the Evil Other. All of that is true and salient. But the most formative element by far was the experience of being seduced by incorrect beliefs and finding my way out the other side.
People, even very smart people, believe in those kinds of lies because it is what seems to make sense at the time, and various social conditions can make people more vulnerable to them.
If that figure is to be believed, that’s about ten per cent of the country’s population dedicated to drug dealing, extortion, and mayhem—so what do you do? Again and again, I heard the same solution being offered, sometimes blithely, sometimes through jaws clenched in rage: kill them all. Kill their girlfriends and their families. Kill their children. One man apologized as he proposed this solution—he found it unseemly to be advocating genocide—but most did not. One young woman, soft-spoken, exceedingly polite, detailed her life in a gang-ridden neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital. It was one terrifying encounter after another, each delivering the same dispiriting lesson: she was helpless in the face of the gangs and their malevolent power. She had done everything she could to avoid them, and still they found ways to control her life. Her father was forced to pay extortion money to one of the gangs—she wouldn’t say which one. By the end of our conversation, she was almost weeping with fury. “I’m a Christian,” she told me, “but those people aren’t my brothers. I would burn them all.”
In my country of birth, many people have given up on rehabilitation and want to try death squads, mass executions, and dictatorship instead. I was one of them, and so were my parents.
Sacrificing the idea of mercy and rehabilitation pushed us, and many others, to accept such authoritarian and dangerous measures for the sake of punishing bad guys. This was all driven largely by anger, empathy for the victims, and a desire for justice.
At the same time, it’s important to note that I changed. I’m as far as you can get from pro-genocide now, and I’m not a special case either. People can change.
It’s not easy if they have become fanatical and suspicious of information that contradicts their beliefs and what they have observed about reality, but it can be done, and I would say that it is the best outcome.
Thanks for this. I find that having undergone a big change in beliefs really boosts a person’s epistemic humility. You’re a great example of that.
I really hate how, in conversations about bi women and their partners in LGBT+ spaces, male partners are always assumed to be straight and cis
like, bi/pan/queer men exist. trans men exist. and it’s not some impossibility that they date bpq women, especially if they meet each other in LGBT+ spaces. I have literally never had a straight cis man as a partner and I don’t intend to for personal reasons, and I don’t think I’m the only bi woman for whom the prospect of dating a cis straight man seems at best exhausting and at worst disgusting.
this is yet another reason why “het partnered” isn’t a good descriptor btw. there are m/f relationships where literally no partners are het.
it’s like everything in the life of a bisexual woman is assumed to revolve around straight men.
nothing I am and nothing I do revolves around straight men.
A small addition: While it is important to know that some bi women don’t/haven’t/won’t date cishet men, and to not assume so, it’s also important to remember that some of them do, and they shouldn’t be shamed for that. They’re not any less LGBT+ for dating a cishet man (or any man, for that matter).
I hope I’m not intruding, but I thought it was important to say.
Also: THIS.
Deep in the belly of a giant fiberglass triceratops, eight rare bats have made a home.
Today in “linguists are not kidding when they say that your command of English enables you to understand sentences that have never occurred before in the entire history of the human species.” (from Atlas Obscura)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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