southsamurai

joined 2 years ago
[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 points 13 hours ago

It's both, and the ratio between them. Or that's what I ran across back ages ago when I looked into it.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 0 points 13 hours ago

No, no it isn't. Not by a big enough margin to matter anyway. The koala one takes three basic facts and misconstrues them so horribly, I think it's worse in a way

Koalas

a small overview about the chlamydia

and it isn't even something they causedit was from invasive species.

One brief overview

with some extra info

The reason koalas eat only eucalyptus isn't stupidity. It's niche evolution. They live in a place with high competition for resources. Having specialized digestive tracts and gut flora allows them to have a food source that isn't under competition. this is a benefit, not a failure. They literally eat something that is poisonous to pretty much every other species. That is an incredible evolutionary adaptation.

Their joeys eating pap is not exclusive to koalas either. It's not only found across the world, the exposure to the gut flora of the parent happens with most mammals, if in a less direct manner. You can even find a ton of information about what happens when human gut flora becomes unbalanced, and it isn't very pretty. It's just worse for koalas.

Not every species is a generalist, and we don't want them to be.

a note on why koalas bellow so much

The source may be a crappy blog, but the information in it matches more detailed data from better sources, and keeps it short enough for this.

As with most behaviors in other species, attributing human judgement and definitions tends to be misleading. While koalas are pretty unique in the lack of mating rituals, they're not doing it for human reasons. Nor are attempts to copulate outside of season as common as the pasta makes it seem. Besides, that's something humans actually do share with them besides the presence of fingerprints. It also isn't so rare in animals as to be remarkable. Copulation behaviors are used outside of mating by plenty of species for social reasons. It isn't in koalas, but since it does increase the chances of mating, it isn't a bad adaptation.

And the extra cerebro-spinal fluid isn't a special ed helmet, it's another adaptation found in other tree dwelling species. Why would an arboreal species having adaptations to mitigate risk from falls be a negative?

Yeah, I get it, the pasta is meant for entertainment, but it also spreads half truths, outright incorrect or outdated information, and skips over facts for the entertainment value. Then people read it and spout it out later as fact.

It's just a crappy copy pasta, not anything meant to be taken as truth, but people are more dumb than koalas.

This pasta in particular isn't the worst (the sunfish one takes the prize for being the most full of bull). Nor is it a bad thing to enjoy as entertainment. But for crying out loud people, don't take random, unsourced copy pasta as an educational tool.

Also This comment covers some things I missed

Then there's this one that is even better

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 16 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The fuck are you smoking? Russian grown weed, I guess

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 0 points 16 hours ago

Agreed completely.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Not all of them, no.

Most of them don't do those nice, sturdy bubbles at all, but they'll get close. Iirc, almond milk comes closest..

It matters in some recipes whether or not the milk substitute will have the right properties. Say, something like a mushroom cream sauce, none of the substitutes work because there's just not duty enough fats. Milk gravy is hit or miss, with almond being the least bad choice iirc. American style biscuits, soy and almond do okay, but need extra acid to get a good rise like you can with buttermilk. But they sub in fine for regular milk in terms of texture and taste.

Stuff like that. Blowing bubbles is a quick way to test a fake milk. Or even types of cow milk, or milk from other animals. Goat milk, as an example, is so close to cow milk in terms of structure it's an easy substitution if flavor isn't a factor. The powdered milk you can get for long term storage or baking is no better than the usual non dairy stuff when reconstituted, and not even as good as skim milk despite being the dry parts of skim milk.

For good bubbles, you need fats. And they need to be similar enough to milk fats, so there's a high degree of parity between a bubble test and cooking outcomes

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 4 points 21 hours ago

That was my first thought too :)

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 0 points 22 hours ago

They're funny for sure :)

If you're wanting to do stuff like festivals, you'd probably want to find a clown school.

But doing it as a volunteer, all you really need is a suit, a face, and skills. Juggling, balloon making, card tricks, etc. Then you reach out to facilities and work out the arrangements for a performance. Hospitals can be a tad restrictive about who gets to do shows for pediatric wards, so you'll likely want to try nursing homes first and build up a local rep.

You can also try to hook up with local sideshow type troupes. Clowns aren't always welcome, but you can usually pick up some skills if you're honest about it. The fire performers won't teach you, but jugglers and magicians will usually share some basics as long as you aren't trying to shaft them with it.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 day ago (11 children)

Need a bigger magnet.

Also, how do they work?

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah, I was the same. Just pissed me off that people took what was meant to be a humorous rant and pretended it was factual.

When I ran across tea and crumpets' rebuttal, I saved a copy immediately.

It kinda became a thing I did. I was a mod of r/goodlongposts for a while, and the rant copy pasta would get caught by the bot a lot, so I'd post the rebuttal. I eventually wrote my own for the koala pasta, then discovered it had already been done. There's a panda one and a mosquito one as well. I used to have one for wasps, but I seem to have lost the file at some point. Skeeters and wasps were more for those times when they'd come up as beginning being hated in general, as I never saw any copy/pasta regarding them.

But, last time I went to the beach, I actually ran across idiots wanting to charter a damn boat to go throw rocks at the things. Which was stupid on multiple levels. But it shows how bad info can spread, so I always feel justified in pasting in the better info.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 day ago (13 children)

I have been so happy that on lemmy, the copy pasta hating sunfish gets soundly criticized and rejected as anything resembling reality.

However, I still want to take the opportunity to copy/paste in the rebuttal to that copy pasta an anti-pasto of sorts. A biologist took the time on reddit to write it up, and I have it saved in markor with a few minor edits.


Sunfish

From u/tea_and_biology

Zoologist here; the majority of this is so inaccurate the guy is basically angry at a figment of his own imagination, paha. I mean there's hyperbole, and then there's hyperbole. Yikes!

They are so completely useless that scientists even debate about how they move. They have little control other than some minor wiggling. So they don't have swim bladders. You know, the one thing that every fish has to make sure it doesn't just sink to the bottom of the ocean when they stop moving and can stay the right side up. This creature. That can barely move to begin with. Can never stop its continuous tour of idiocy across the ocean or it'll fucking sink.

Sunfish are, in fact, well understood and, though clumsy when idly basking, are reasonably accomplished swimmers when diving. They stroke their dorsal and anal fins laterally and in a synchronous manner to generate a lift-based thrust that enables 'em to cruise at speeds of 2-3mph (source), comparable to a whale shark and the perfect speed for suction feeding; ploughing straight into smacks of jellyfish and gobbling 'em all up.

Where they excel amongst fish is their ability to undergo substantial vertical movement in the water column. They possess large deposits of low-density, subcutaneous, gelatinous tissue which, unlike a swim bladder (which would otherwise change volume with hydrostatic pressure), is incompressible, enabling rapid depth changes and keeping them neutrally and stably buoyant independent of surrounding water pressure.

So, yeah, their unusual bodies are basically one big paddle, capable of putting some force behind their swimming to move over considerable distances, descending very deep, very fast.

They mostly only eat jellyfish because of course they do, they could only eat something that has no brain and a possibility of drifting into their mouths I guess. Everything they do eat has almost zero nutritional value and because it's so stupidly fucking big, it has to eat a ton of the almost no nutritional value stuff to stay alive.

Dumb. Also incorrect. Jellyfish and other Cnidarians comprise only around 15% of their diet; they mostly eat young fish (including conger eelets) and crustaceans (pelagic crab, krill, copepods etc.), alongside squid, bivalves and other assorted zooplankton. They're generalist predators, not jellyfish specialists like sea turtles (source).

They have a particularly rapid growth rate amongst bony fish, owing much to their unique genetics (source).

Some scientists have speculated that when they do that, they are absorbing energy from the sun because no one fucking knows how they manage to get any real energy to begin with. So they need the sun I guess.

They spend the majority of their time actively hunting in the very cold deep (usually at ~200m, but up to 600m) and, being ectotherms, therefore regulate their temperature by basking in the sun, before pursuing another dive. Think of marine iguanas basking on hot rocks between nibble trips.

And this concludes why I hate the fuck out of this complete failure of evolution, the Ocean Sunfish. If I ever see one, I will throw rocks at it.

Sunfish have been kicking about in temperate and tropical waters worldwide for around 50 million years and, until humans arrived on the scene, were overwhelmingly successful in their ecological niche. Sadly they're under threat by human activity and human activity alone - frequently caught as by-catch; having little commercial value, like sharks, their fins are cut off before they're dumped, often still alive, back into the sea to die. If one is to start throwing rocks at terrible creatures, perhaps one should look at us humans first.

Or, there's The visual rebuttal, credit to u/iamnotburgerking

On the cheek

And it depends on the drug, butt most of them won't absorb via the anal sphincter fast, so unless it's just sitting there, the hooker wouldn't get high.

You could snort a line from the crack, if the position was right though. Just need a long though enough straw. But the usual places coke or meth get snorted from are the butt cheeks, cock, and boobs (depending in the stripper or hooker's equipment.

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