Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Humpback whales are able to navigate exceptionally well and I don’t think science knows how.

    Humpback whales travel by picking a direction and traveling in that direction. They can maintain a true course to within a degree of accuracy for hundreds of miles regardless of location on the planet, ocean currents, magnetic variation, day or night, though open empty ocean.

    I know how to do that, but I need stuff the whales don’t have like visual reference to a solid surface, accurate charts, radio-based navaids, winds aloft forecasts, and/or gyroscopic instruments. Most of the time, most creatures either navigate by landmarks, some are able to navigate magnetically, some can home, ie they can sense a destination and point their noses at it and go that way, as forces such as winds, ocean currents, Coriolis force etc. push them off course they steer to keep the destination dead ahead, tracing a half-teardrop course.

    But humpbacks can pick a direction and go perfectly straight. Somehow.












  • On the one hand, I’m convinced Marie Antoinette didn’t say or think like that.

    On the other hand, I think there’s a good case to make that if her brother had come to Versailles and explained to Louis XVI how to fuck his sister four or five years before he actually did, the French Revolution wouldn’t have happened.

    The short version of this story as I, an American nearing the bottom of his third Mint Julep of the evening, understands it, is the French–of all people–came up with a king that didn’t know how to use his penis. Letters from nobles at the time explain how he would stick it in, soak without moving for two minutes or so, and then “bid goodnight.” I mean, to be fair, they were like 15 on their wedding day. So Marie Antoinette’s life consisted of hanging around Versailles, a palace designed specifically to be an expensive place to hang around. She basically partied the French economy empty, like any teenage girl in her shoes would have. Eventually her brother, Joseph II, visited Versailles and apparently had to awkwardly explain to the young king what orgasms are, and eight months later Marie was pregnant with her first child. She significantly toned down the lavish lifestyle by then, but not after spending the country into an actual crisis.

    It is my understanding that, later in life, Marie would show some frugality, doing away with expensive gifts for her children during famines and such. This happened when she was an adult, I think I must point out. Again, I am an American and thus indoctrinated against the very idea of royalty, but a flaw in absolute monarchy is that absolute power over foreign and domestic policy may land in the hands of a teenager who can’t figure out his crotch by himself, and the only thing standing between the nation and an empty treasury is one very specific teen pregnancy.


  • You know, genuinely…American education tends to go “Then there was World War One and we tried to stay out of it because it was Europe’s problem but we had to go win it anyway then there was the roaring 20s and the great depression 30’s and then MOTHAFUCKIN WORLD WAR TWO, the four years that makes up two thirds or our nation’s 250 year history.” So the scene where Blackadder sits George and Baldrick down and describes the alliances and how “there was only one problem. It was bollocks.” Is genuinely my understanding of WWI. That and rotary piston engines. I know what a blip switch is.