death mention

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

“Don’t worry, Commander, I won’t mess this up.”

I’d say “five bucks says Jenkins dies by the end of the prologue”, but I’m not making that bet with a bunch of people who know the answer.

Tags:

#Brin plays Mass Effect #surprisingly unspoiled considering how much Mass Effect stuff I come across on a regular basis #and have for years #(I’ve pretty much gotten the hang of my phone so I’m moving on to the next thing I was looking forward to) #oh look an original post #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reactionblogging

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rhamphotheca:

Snake Poop and The Adaptive Ballast Hypothesis

by Andrew Durso

Most people probably spend as little time as possible thinking about poop, especially snake poop. Some animals produce enormous amounts of poop, like dairy cows. Others make lots of little poops – up to 50 a day in small birds.  

In contrast, snakes don’t poop much at all. In fact, because they eat so infrequently, snakes probably poop the least often of almost any animal. Anyone who has kept a snake as a pet can tell you that a few days after they’re fed, most snakes tend to poop once (often in their water bowls, for some annoying reason), and they might poop again within a few more days.

Like bird poop, snake poop is made up of two parts – the brown stuff (the fecal fragment, aka the actual poop) and the white stuff (the uric acid fragment, aka the pee, in a solid form). Also like birds, most reptiles use uric acid rather than urea to excrete their excess nitrogen, which helps them conserve water.

You wouldn’t think there would be much that’s interesting about snake poop, but to a snake biologist everything about snakes is interesting. In 2002, Harvey Lillywhite, Pierre de Delva, and Brice Noonan published a chapter in the book Biology of the Vipers that detailed their studies on snake poop.

Their most amazing finding was that some snakes can go for a really, really long time without pooping. As in, over a year. It’s not because they’re constipated though – these long fecal retention periods have actually evolved for a purpose in snakes.

Here’s what happens: most snakes eat very large meals, and they eat them all in one piece. That means that when a snake eats a meal, its body mass can more than double all at once, and it can only digest that meal from the outside in, because it hasn’t chewed or cut it up into small pieces to increase its surface area. Even for the insane digestive tract of a snake, this is an incredible feat…

(read more: Life is Short, Snakes Are Long)

photos: A. Durso, Pedro Rodriguez, and Cater News Agency

Tags:

#snake #poop #the more you know #you know how pretty much every kid goes through an -ology phase? #mine was herpetology #so my inner nine-year-old is pretty happy right now #(though the later versions of me find it a bad sign that this guy thinks it’s okay to link to *Dr. Oz* as a reputable source) #(but you can’t have everything) #(and he did pick a very nice blog title)

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coordinatornarvin:

the-fandoms-are-valentines:

grandtheftautosanandreas:

Douglas Adams is the best when it comes to describe characters

they need to teach classes on Douglas Adams analogies okay

“He leant tensely against the corridor wall and frowned like a man trying to unbend a corkscrew by telekinesis.”

“Stones, then rocks, then boulders which pranced past him like clumsy puppies, only much, much bigger, much, much harder and heavier, and almost infinitely more likely to kill you if they fell on you.”

“He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off.”

“It looked only partly like a spaceship with guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches and so on, and a great deal like a small upended Italian bistro.”

“If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one. It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not as a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was deadly – again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly.”

You forgot the best one though-

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #may or may not have reblogged this before #Douglas Adams

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redbeardace:

Today is the 100th Anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.  This is a Keystone Stereo View of Sarajevo, from the Keystone View Company’s “The World War” set, probably from the 1920’s.

Interesting side note:  The Keystone View Company used a picture of the wrong bridge! This is not the Latin Bridge, near where the assassination took place. This is the Seher-Cehaja Bridge, about half a kilometer upriver. This photo is also facing south, while the assassination took place on the north side of the river.

Tags:

#history #neat