Donald Trump has officially completed one full year as president, and holy moly what a year it’s been. You probably don’t even remember how much stuff really happened in the last year because mentally it’s felt like 20.
There’s no better indicator of the bizarre day-to-day developments of President Trump’s first year in office than reading the wonderful chyrons, the headline captions you see at the bottom of your screen during a news broadcast.
So rather than attempt to describe the past year, we picked out some of the best chyrons to illustrate just what a Twilight Zone-esque 365 days we’ve had.
Dogs are excellent in general and have amazing capabilities with their noses, but there are a few problems with how they are used. The kind of dog that is amenable to training is more than anything else a people-pleaser, and handlers have to be careful not to pass along their own prejudices to the dog.
Namely: Cueing is a thing. Dogs pick up on cues from their handlers that x person is extremely suspicious and something is wrong here and they will eagerly set about detecting a problem where no problem exists – but once the dog has cued, the police have the go ahead to jump in and search, arrest, etc.
In this way all the racial prejudice of the human cops gets enforced by “evidence” from the dog and harassment is the result. Legally IIRC a dog sniffing doesn’t count as a “search”, but it does justify a search if the dog signals that they found something. Guess who gets proportionally more searches as a result.
This famous study for the journal of Animal Cognition in 2011 tested pairs of handlers and dogs by telling the handlers drugs were planted on a scene, but in fact no drugs were placed anywhere. The dogs signaled for drugs in every single room and more often in areas the handlers had been alerted to, showing that either the handler was reading the dog’s signals wrong due to their own beliefs, or the dog was picking up on their beliefs and signaling accordingly.
If giraffes were predators they would look both hilarious and terrifying while sneaking up on their prey
I’m afraid you’ve missed the predatory giraffes by about 66 million years mate.
These guys are Azhdarchid pterosaurs, and they were some of the strangest reptiles to ever exist. They were perfectly capable of flight, but their physiology suggests that they may have spent a significant portion of their lives hunting on the ground.
The largest of them could reach over 5 metres tall while standing, and had a 10-metre wingspan. They varied greatly in body type, from the tall, spindly forms of Quetzalcoatlus and Arambourgiania (images 4 and 1-2 respectively) to the heavy brute strength of Hatzegopteryz, a species that may have used its head to bludgeon its prey (images 2 and 3).
There has never been another flying animal before or since to have reached such incredible sizes, nor any predator so intimidatingly tall. Well, not any that we know of yet.
All of these illustrations are by Mark Witton, a palaeontologist and artist who specialises in pterosaurs. This is his blog about palaeontology and the science of reconstructing extinct species. You can find out more about each of these images here, here and here.
(Oh, and by the way … these are NOT dinosaurs)
What the hell these are so intimidating, why aren’t these in any dinosaur movies
while I’m offering opinions let me just add this one, in response to some hand-wringing I read earlier today:
Yes, people should have the opportunity to rehabilitate and redeem themselves and make themselves better people after they have done wrong, but that sure doesn’t mean that after an “appropriate” period of contrition and remorse perpetrators should be handed back the positions of power and influence that they used to abuse people in the first place. Fuck that. Fuck no. Fling that notion directly into the sun and do not give these men the ability to abuse people again no matter how sad and sorry they are.
Also criticize anarchism, fine, but there’s way more schools of thought to it than just the tunglr.hell anprim bullshit and that one 9/11 truther who thinks the noble savage idea is radikewl, even though I know they make great memes and sassy gotchas in the discourse
anprims are allowed to exist so long as this meme keeps being funny:
Also criticize anarchism, fine, but there’s way more schools of thought to it than just the tunglr.hell anprim bullshit and that one 9/11 truther who thinks the noble savage idea is radikewl, even though I know they make great memes and sassy gotchas in the discourse
anprims are allowed to exist so long as this meme keeps being funny:
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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