happybadger
@happybadger@hexbear.net
Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your premier source for patriotic facts.
- Comment on Ukraine allows some convicts to join armed forces in manpower push 15 hours ago:
The new law offers parole to convicts who sign a contract to join the army, a move that some officials have said could generate a maximum of 20,000 soldiers for the Ukrainian war effort.
I wonder if the net results of this, TCC kidnappings, and forced deportations will be enough to even patch the casualties of the summer offensive. Even if they conscript some wildly optimistic number of people- 50k, 100k, whatever- it’s giving the most demoralised citizens a few days of training before permanently disabling whoever survives. There are videos of genuine WW1 shell shock just from being near a FAB and Russia is still flying like 100 sorties a day delivering those.
- Comment on Gaza war: Five Israeli soldiers killed 'by tank fire' in Jabalia 1 day ago:
Finally living up that nickname of most moral army in the world.
- Comment on First human to receive transplanted pig kidney dies 5 days ago:
important sentence:
“We have no indication that it was the result of his recent transplant.”
- Comment on Congress lets broadband funding run out, ending $30 low-income discounts 2 weeks ago:
The money that’d be putting food on their table is going to those bombs. They’d be extra mad if they had access to that information.
- Comment on Congress lets broadband funding run out, ending $30 low-income discounts 2 weeks ago:
68 percent of ACP households stated they had inconsistent or zero connectivity prior to ACP.
We gotta prevent people from knowing about the genocide.
- Comment on My bioluminescent petunia 2 weeks ago:
Super neat. At some point I need to intern at a plant breeding lab just to inject that into all of my houseplants that can tolerate it. Right now I’ve got a mix of pothos, hoyas, philodendrons, and jasmines trailing around my house and it’d be so much better if they were one long nightlight.
- Comment on My bioluminescent petunia 2 weeks ago:
Does it glow this well to the naked eye or did you have to do any photography tricks?
- Comment on Huawei phone has a pop-out camera lens, just like a point-and-shoot camera 4 weeks ago:
I hope that catches on. I hate that my phone is 80% as good as my $500 DSLR but has absolutely no depth perception. Software fills in the background with a shitty bokeh effect that ruined my favourite wildflower photo I’ve taken. If we get a trend of actual lenses then maybe that will start to go away.
- Comment on nailed it 4 weeks ago:
gastrocnemius
Stomach of the leg. That’s almost reaching the level of Amorphophallus titanum.
- Comment on land shrimp 5 weeks ago:
montclair.edu/…/cicadas-safe-to-eat-sustainable-d…
spoiler
After 17 years underground, billions of periodical cicadas known as Brood X are set to emerge, and we hope you’ve brought your appetite. See, a swarm of cicadas may sound scary, but they’re quite harmless and, in actuality, can be a new food to introduce into your diet. Calling all adventurous eaters! Assistant Professor of Anthropology Cortni Borgerson, whose research focuses on natural resource use, sustainability and food security, says that the fact that they make a tasty snack is just one of the wonders of cicadas. “Brood X cicadas are one of the world’s most incredible animal phenomena,” says Borgerson. “In a year where few of us may be traveling to see natural wonders like Africa’s great migration, or the elephant gathering of Sri Lanka, we are incredibly privileged to have this rare spectacle occurring in our very own backyards. Brood X provides an infusion of nutrients into the ecosystem, and humans have been enjoying this event for its sights, sounds and taste for millenia.” Eating cicadas (and other bugs) is sustainable and nutritious Many may associate the idea of eating bugs with survival reality shows, but consider this: Not only can insects actually make for a great and tasty bite when thoughtfully prepared (see recipes below), they’re also a nutritious meat alternative high in protein and minerals, and are a sustainable food source. Indeed, they may be small, but bugs can have a mighty big impact on humans. “Insects are an important source of food for more than two billion people on Earth, including many food cultures within the United States,” says Borgerson. “These little meats are not only a mainstream food source, they’re also a more sustainable choice than other species of livestock, which can require a lot of land, water and feed. Embracing food diversity and incorporating insects and other traditional foods into our diets isn’t only a great way to connect with our cultures and our natural environments, it’s also a key step toward living sustainably.” Where to find cicadas to harvest Annual cicadas can be found toward the end of the summer, emerging mostly in parks, forests, other wooded areas and even in your backyard. These are safe places to collect them once they’ve shed; basically anywhere you’d feel safe keeping a garden is a good bet. Avoid collecting and eating cicadas from places with a history of industrial use. As for Brood X, you’ll need a map to find these periodical cicadas – and your best bet is to look for where they most commonly popped up last time around. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offers a map of where the Brood X cicadas are expected to emerge, by county. For a breakdown by towns in New Jersey, check out this comprehensive list from NJ.com. “You’ll be able to hear when you’re close,” says Borgerson. “These cicadas live as nymphs underground for 17 years, and then tunnel up through the ground to the surface where they shed into their winged adult phase, living only 4-6 weeks. Cicada are tastiest in their teneral stage, which is right after they’ve shed into their adult forms, but are still pale white before their exoskeletons have hardened. “So at dusk, look for those wingless nymphs and enjoy the incredible show as they shed and transform and slowly inflate their new wings. Then pop a few into a bag and take them home to freeze for about 30 minutes before you prepare them.” Cicadas, a gateway bug to entomophagy If you’re curious about entomophagy (the practice of eating insects, especially by humans), cicadas are a great place to start. Unlike other bugs that can have “crunchy exoskeletons and wings,” teneral cicadas have a nutty, green, almost peeled shrimp-y look, taste and texture similar to the crustaceans. “You can add them to any of your favorite dishes,” says Borgerson. “They don’t need peeling or extensive prepping, just pan fry them or parboil and toast them in the oven, and then use them like you would any of their crustacean relatives. Personally, I love them by themselves on toothpicks as an appetizer or in tacos, where you can use the toppings to bring out a lot of their green spring flavors.” Before you know it, you may enjoy eating cicadas so much that you’ll move on to toasted cricket snacks, green ant gin, grasshoppers in chapulines tacos and more. Don’t eat cicadas if you’re allergic to shellfish Cicadas have a similar chitinous exterior as shellfish, so while there’s no overwhelming evidence that those with allergies have had reactions after eating cicadas, there’s not much research in its favor, either. “A shellfish allergy increases the likelihood that you will be allergic to cicada, so it’s better to be safe than sorry and abstain from land arthropods if you can’t eat their sea swimming cousins.” Can animals safely eat cicadas? OK, so what happens if you’re so busy munching on your new favorite snack that you don’t realize your beloved pet just ate a cicada or two (or more)? “Many mammals and birds are about to feast on the periodic cicadas, so don’t be surprised if your pet cat, dog, or backyard fowl indulge a little as well,” says Borgerson. “There’s nothing to be worried about — cicadas are high in protein and their chitin is great for gut health.”
If you’re curious about entomophagy (the practice of eating insects, especially by humans), cicadas are a great place to start. Unlike other bugs that can have “crunchy exoskeletons and wings,” teneral cicadas have a nutty, green, almost peeled shrimp-y look, taste and texture similar to the crustaceans.
“You can add them to any of your favorite dishes,” says Borgerson. “They don’t need peeling or extensive prepping, just pan fry them or parboil and toast them in the oven, and then use them like you would any of their crustacean relatives. Personally, I love them by themselves on toothpicks as an appetizer or in tacos, where you can use the toppings to bring out a lot of their green spring flavors.”
Cicadas have a similar chitinous exterior as shellfish, so while there’s no overwhelming evidence that those with allergies have had reactions after eating cicadas, there’s not much research in its favor, either. “A shellfish allergy increases the likelihood that you will be allergic to cicada, so it’s better to be safe than sorry and abstain from land arthropods if you can’t eat their sea swimming cousins.” Can animals safely eat cicadas?
I’m definitely giving these a try this year.
- Comment on Reddit may need to ramp up spending on content moderation, analysts say 1 month ago:
And the moment they recognise it as work, they’re forced to recognise how much work goes into a large subreddit. When I was a r/todayIlearned mod at 1m subscribers, 1/35th of its current userbase, it was a professionalised thing with its own meta subreddits/mod chat channel/scheduled shifts to ensure that there was someone on at all times. r/Askhistorians has to fact check every comment in every thread or else it’s overwhelmed immediately. 90%+ of the posts on r/modernart were from people who have no idea what that term means despite it being plastered all over the subreddit, and the moment you allow anything made after 1985~ it’s immediately filled with spam. Even at 20-100k subscribers, r/fifthworldproblems had so many low effort posts that it burned out every mod I had trying to decide whether something was both funny and non-referential or not. Doing the job well in any of those subreddits only rewards you with more work while any spurned user is potentially trawling your profile to dox you for removing their post.
The only way I could see them trying to pull it off is through enshittification. I could see them making users pay a subscription fee either for the reddit account or for individual subreddits, especially as a public company legally bound to maximise quarterly shareholder earnings. The userbase is nuked, mods get a fraction of a pool that amounts to less than minimum wage and no worker protections as independent contractors, and every month brings more things making the website worse.
- Comment on Reddit may need to ramp up spending on content moderation, analysts say 1 month ago:
I don’t see them shifting to paid mods or offering adequate compensation for the current ones. It’s a 24/7 customer service job for countless little cliques with their own subcultures/agendas/ideological leanings.
If you flatten that to generic spam removers, automoderator already does that and the website is horrible despite it. If you have official power mods, the guy tasked with censoring all leftist dissent in r/worldnews is also tasked with knowing what modern art is in r/modernart and the ages of anime characters so nobody posts CSAM in those subreddits. If I’m running a subreddit for free and someone else is getting paid to, I’m no longer bothering to. If I’m about to create a subreddit and know reddit will steal it and give it to the censorship squad once it’s large enough, I’m making that on Lemmy instead.
They build their entire company on the backs of volunteer exploitation and there is no unfucking that without revealing how fragile reddit is.
- Comment on Reddit faces new reality after cashing in on its IPO 1 month ago:
I finally offboarded r/modernart to lemmy.ml/c/modernism today in anticipation of the IPO launch. Already reddit heavily censors and recuperates anything radical. That’s only going to get much worse along with advertising and bots. I can’t see the website lasting in its current form and that’s already pathetic. Lemmy is poised to really take off as reddit ratfucks itself.
- Comment on Mmm yesss 1 month ago:
The illustration from the full study: i.imgur.com/2sS64b6.png
- Comment on The humiliating truth behind Harvard astronomer's "alien" spherules 1 month ago:
He had to be fleecing the private sponsor of the expedition. Even when he was making the sci-fi youtube circuit during the planning stages of it, particularly with Event Horizon, it seemed so absurd from the start. To pinpoint a location like that and find what you’re looking for immediately at the bottom of the sea doesn’t otherwise happen and he was absolutely confident in the anticipated result of a hypothesis with no basis. There was one conclusion right from the outset and that’s so wildly divorced from how science works.
Hopefully it ruins his career.
- Comment on archaeology 101 1 month ago:
soypoint-1 [old human shit] soypoint-2
- Comment on South Africans take on big pharma for access to ‘miracle’ cystic fibrosis drug 1 month ago:
www.cysticfibrosis.ca/our-programs/…/trikafta
Canadian research published in the Journal of Cystic Fibrosis demonstrates that access to Trikafta in 2021 would result in profound health benefits for Canadians living with cystic fibrosis. By 2030, Trikafta could reduce the number of people living with severe lung disease by 60% and reduce the number of deaths by 15%.
The findings show a significantly slower disease progression with an 18% increase in people with mild lung disease and 19% fewer hospitalizations or home intravenous antibiotics for pulmonary exacerbations. The estimated median age of survival for a child born with cystic fibrosis would increase by 9.2 years
[…]
On average, Trikafta use leads to a 14% increase in lung function over the untreated baseline. In clinical trials of the triple combination therapy, people with two copies of the F508del mutation had a 10% increase in lung function on average compared to treatment with Symdeko (that already provides a 4% increase over baseline), and people with a single copy of F508del had, on average, more than a 14% increase in lung function compared to treatment with the placebo.
- Comment on EVE Online dev CCP's blockchain "survival experience" Project Awakening is getting a closed playtest in May 2 months ago:
CCP’s CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson was a lot more down-to-Earth when Jeremy spoke to him last October. In particular, he offered the following, spirited defence of the game’s blockchain functionality, which can sort of be boiled down to “trust me, bro”, but is at least upfront about the many bad uses to which blockchain and cryptography technologies have been put.
“People do stupid things with everything. Like in the 1700s in Holland, people made [speculative] bubbles with tulips. Are tulips bad? The tulips are not to blame. People are to blame. People do stupid shit with new things all the time. It’s just what we do. Look at any industry; there are people doing bad things, people doing nefarious things, people doing stupid things, and people doing very cool and wholesome things. I just don’t care how bad people have used [blockchain] in the past. If people hate me for something they’re assuming I’m going to do that I’m not doing. Not my problem; it’s their problem.”
I love when crypto dipshits can describe how irrational it is but are so blinded by greed that they’re oblivious to that. Yes, the blockchain is analogous to the tulip mania. What happened to the people who built their business off tulip speculation? At least the farmers had a pretty flower to sell for a few pennies after the bubble burst and all the fetish value was lost. Anything crypto is completely alienating to normal people because it’s a clear scam being artificially soypoint-1 hyped by the most obnoxious weirdos on the internet. I won’t want to play a blockchain game because it’s a game despite the blockchain features, and I won’t want to engage with the blockchain features because you’re selling me overpriced tulips through an overly-convoluted system. If all crypto and NFT shit is stripped out and it’s selling the blockchain to non-crypto people as a public ledger, that has no use to me in a survival game and I’d just play EVE if I wanted to look at numbers.
- Comment on These violent delights have violent ends 2 months ago:
Like the guillotine, my sense of radical mercy started with understanding that you decapitate the dinosaur nugget swiftly. Pain isn’t the punishment.
- Comment on Colorado funeral home owner kept cremated remains of at least 30 people, police say 2 months ago:
Jesus, this isn’t the story about the Colorado funeral home that was raided for having 115 decaying bodies laying around last year: apnews.com/…/colorado-funeral-home-green-burials-…
Funeral homes need to have an equivalent of restaurant health inspectors but for people doing weird shit with corpses.
- Comment on Record waiting times for cancer treatment in the UK while King Charles begins treatment within days of diagnosis 3 months ago:
Very similar to the vibes of that coronation photo where he is riding in a golden carriage over a ruined street where every pothole is hastily filled with sand.
- Comment on Mass killer back in court attempting to sue Norway for alleged human rights breaches 4 months ago:
Norway favours rehabilitation over retribution - and Breivik is held in a two-story complex with a kitchen, dining room and TV room with an Xbox, several armchairs and black and white pictures of the Eiffel Tower on the wall.
He also has a fitness room with weights, treadmill and rowing machine, while three parakeets fly around the complex.
It’s better than my apartment. I’d love to have the room for a rowing machine.
- Comment on Whale-SETI: Groundbreaking Encounter with Humpback Whales Reveals Potential for Non-Human Intelligence Communication 5 months ago:
In response to a recorded humpback ‘contact’ call played into the sea via an underwater speaker, a humpback whale named Twain approached and circled the team’s boat, while responding in a conversational style to the whale ‘greeting signal.’ During the 20-minute exchange, Twain responded to each playback call and matched the interval variations between each signal.
CETI is such a cool project. I wonder how far they’ll be able to get with it.
- Comment on Humanities be like 5 months ago:
I’ve taken like four or five advanced trigonometry courses and I still can’t really define what trigonometry is. Mathematics is like Andrew Tate’s Hustler University scam. If you take one class, it only exists to prove that you’re a mark and sell you more classes.
- Comment on GTA 6 leaked video 5 months ago:
From the shitty sky box it’s clearly some kind of alpha build, but damn the detail on the street level is so much better than GTA 5.
- Comment on The 'ol 1 2 5 months ago:
I hate when science headlines try to make shit seem all mysterious for clickbaits. Those are just the blood temples. We’ve known about them for decades. It’s not like a whole thing.
- Comment on Corvids... 5 months ago:
livescience.com/crows-understand-concept-of-zero.…
www.jneurosci.org/content/41/22/4889
ABSTRACT: Different species of animals can discriminate numerosity, the countable number of objects in a set. The representations of countable numerosities have been deciphered down to the level of single neurons. However, despite its importance for human number theory, a special numerical quantity, the empty set (numerosity zero), has remained largely unexplored. We explored the behavioral and neuronal representation of the empty set in carrion crows. Crows were trained to discriminate small numerosities including the empty set. Performance data showed a numerical distance effect for the empty set in one crow, suggesting that the empty set and countable numerosities are represented along the crows’ “mental number line.” Single-cell recordings in the endbrain region nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) showed a considerable proportion of NCL neurons tuned to the preferred numerosity zero. As evidenced by neuronal distance and size effects, NCL neurons integrated the empty set in the neural number line. A subsequent neuronal population analysis using a statistical classifier approach showed that the neuronal numerical representations were predictive of the crows’ success in the task. These behavioral and neuronal data suggests that the conception of the empty set as a cognitive precursor of a zero-like number concept is not an exclusive property of the cerebral cortex of primates. Zero as a quantitative category cannot only be implemented in the layered neocortex of primates, but also in the anatomically distinct endbrain circuitries of birds that evolved based on convergent evolution.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: The conception of “nothing” as number “zero” is celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in mathematics. To explore whether precursors of zero-like concepts can be found in vertebrates with a cerebrum that anatomically differs starkly from our primate brain, we investigated this in carrion crows. We show that crows can grasp the empty set as a null numerical quantity that is mentally represented next to number one. Moreover, we show that single neurons in an associative avian cerebral region specifically respond to the empty set and show the same physiological characteristics as for countable quantities. This suggests that zero as a quantitative category can also be implemented in the anatomically distinct endbrain circuitries of birds that evolved based on convergent evolution.
- Comment on trig 5 months ago:
I wonder what a tan^-1^gerine would look like.
- Comment on No one: ... Ambulances: 6 months ago:
It was nice in Japan where there’s no real limit on vehicular noise. A guy grilling sweet potatoes, an ultranationalist party screaming about immigrants, and an ambulance all have equal right to scream things over a megaphone.
- Comment on No one: ... Ambulances: 6 months ago:
I can confirm they do this and you can scream at people over the intercom while pushing the we-wo harder button.