Common Raven (Corvus corax), parent with nestlings – photo by Vadim Ivushkin
Baby crows and ravens hatch naked and helpless, and over the course of a few weeks grow to near their parents’ size as their feathers come in. Any image of a small fluffy black bird labeled as a “baby crow” or “baby raven” is a totally different bird. The most common images mislabeled are actually rail or crake chicks, which are wetlands birds not even remotely related to crows and ravens.
If you zoom in you can see the trail of a bunny and what I think was probably either two coyotes or (my guess) the same coyote twice.
Snow is cool.
Upon further review the decision on the field is overturned; the OP’s tags indicate that this was taken in Poland. The “coyote” was almost certainly a dog (or two dogs). Half the distance to the goal line; still third down.
First time for everything. Today was the first time I’ve ever seen a baby rail in a tumblr post, scrolled down, and did not find it being misidentified as a baby crow.
To make your day complete, have an actual baby crow to go with it:
PokemonGoTech is a parody account. It isn’t affiliated with Niantic/Nintendo. So those aren’t likely to be real numbers.
It’s true the game has been down a fair amount, especially at times of high activity. The last bad meltdown was Saturday morning on the US east coast, when the bulk of the US trainer population, having looked forward all week to getting some quality Go time in on their day off before it got too hot (there’s currently a heat wave over much of the US), tried to play all at once.
For what it’s worth, a highly-respected-by-me sysadmin/devops person (not at Niantic, but people talk) was saying that the scuttlebutt she’s heard is that it’s not really a server-scaling issue, because the server side of PGo is running in the Google Cloud and if it was just a question of spinning up more servers that would be easy. It is, rather, a “code is hard to shard across servers” issue; i.e., a software design limitation. In still other words, the system, while clearly doing some pretty impressive things in terms of handling a mind-boggling amount of activity, wasn’t so well-designed that it could actually scale smoothly all the way up to the current level of demand.
So that’s a software issue, and getting it diagnosed, fixed, tested, and deployed is the kind of thing that’s going to take more time than just turning up a dial.
I suspect that the “bugs” of the Nearby tray in the app becoming random/useless and the capture location maps no longer loading are in fact intentional steps they’ve taken to lessen the demands of the application. That is, they’ve intentionally degraded the game by turning those features off in order to lessen the system’s back end requirements while they scramble to fix the larger problem.
It’s probably going to take at least a while longer before things are running smoothly. I appreciate what they’re doing to keep things afloat as best they can in the meantime. I’ve always liked walking around outside, so if I end up having to put my phone away and enjoy reality unaugmented, that’s okay with me. :-)
Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won the best director Oscar on Sunday for The Revenant, has defended himself in the face of criticism for appearing not to applaud the costume designer Jenny Beavan as she made her way to the stage to pick up her award.
In a widely-circulated clip – the Vine has been viewed over 38 million times – Iñárritu is among a number of attendees who are shown not to be clapping, instead regarding Beavan with what many have interpreted as disdain.
In a statement issued to the Guardian on Thursday, Iñárritu called such speculation ‘mean-spirited and false.’
“I think Jenny Beavan is a masterful costume designer and very deserving of the Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road,” he said. Iñárritu also sent a gif showing that he did clap later, as Beavan made her way up the steps to the stage, where she was presented with the award by Cate Blanchett.
Iñárritu continued: “By editing and omitting the full reality and suggesting I felt anything but admiration is mean-spirited and false. What you don’t see in the 10 second clip being circulated is my applause for Jenny as she ascended the stairs to the stage.”
He director concluded: “I’ve learned a lot this awards season… that I should never cross my arms when I am sitting down.
”
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Alejandro González Iñárritu: ‘I did applaud Jenny Beavan at the Oscars.’ [x]
[gif of Jenny Beaven walking up to the stage to receive her Oscar, while audience members clap in the background, including The Revenant director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Spotlight director Tom McCarthy]
Because she had to make the long walk from the cheap seats where the less-famous people sit there was time for those aisle dudes to have stopped clapping while they waited for her to make it down front. When she appeared they were momentarily surprised, because her look (in that context) was legitimately surprising. And of course a moment later they were applauding along with everyone else, but the famous gif stopped before that point. So you just see them looping forever being apparently awful, and the longer you watch the more awful they seem, because your subconscious human-expression-processing apparatus thinks, “Wow. They’ve been scowling a really long time. They must be signaling intense disapproval.”
Millions of people have looked at that gif. A few thousand will eventually come across this explanation. It’s how modern media works. It’s how 100% fake posts on Tumblr get hundreds of thousands of credulous reblogs, but if you look through the notes you find the same exasperated corrections over and over. It’s how a savvy media manipulator like Donald Trump asserts something outrageously untrue on seen-by-millions television, then retracts it in contexts seen only by a tiny fraction of those who saw the original lie.
Tumblr lies. Mass media lies. Our own brains lie.
You think that’s air you’re breathing? Nope. Lies.
Correction: I have discovered that this photo is NOT of the spanker mast hoops aboard the USS Constitution, nor is it from aboard the Pride of Baltimore II. I have traced this to the original photographer: http://ift.tt/1Pm4SbX who states that she took this photo aboard the Sloop Providence in Portsmouth, NH in July, 2012.
The year is 1995, congress member Bernie Sanders stands in opposition of a homophobic statement said by Duke Cunningham. Cunningham derisively refers to “homos in the military” to support his argument while (strangely) discussing the Clean Water Act. Sanders, having none of it, quickly rises to the defense of thousands of men and women everywhere. Sanders ire is such that he repeatedly disrespects the Chairman by speaking over him in order to say his piece. [Video Source]
What does this say for Sanders? Well, that’s for you to decide. But to me, it says that for 20+ years strong he has shown his public support for LGBT+ persons everywhere, even in the face of ridicule and disrespect. Unlike some, Sanders has always been vocal about his beliefs concerning the LGBT+ community, and he has always held them. Key word always, and not just when doing so might garner him support for his campaigns.
Heh. I’m not sure if it’s intended to be hilarious or not, but I’ll take it.
I think this was the show I saw a bit of a few years ago (if it wasn’t this one it was essentially the same thing) where they were in a creepy old house at night ghost-hunting. And at one point they captured a horrifying sound.
“Dude! Did you hear that? Did you hear that? It was the ghost! I think I got it on tape!”
Followed by multiple playbacks, tightly cropped close-ups of their excited night-vision faces, and dramatic music. Like, that was the climax of the episode.
The sound was also unmistakably the scream of a hunting barn owl. We used to hear them all the time until we lost some of the big trees in our neighborhood where they liked to roost.
There were some other low-grade reality shows that my son, especially, was really into that I used to catch from time to time. Call of the Wild Man (with “Turtleman” Ernie Brown, Jr.) was similarly fun.
I think it’s probably useful training for a modern media consumer to watch some low-budget reality shows. The high-end shows do the same sorts of things in terms of constructing deceptive (but entertaining) narratives with staging and editing, but it’s much more obvious when it’s a couple of guys with a camcorder, as opposed to some high-end product like Deadliest Catch or Project Runway.
The precipitous rise in carbon pollution is what’s driving climate change, leading to rising sea levels, more extreme drought, superstorms, wildfires, and public health problems across the world. No nation is immune to these consequences. Humans caused this rise in pollution and temperature, and it will take all of us to actually do something about it.
Also: why we are failing.
I find this chart both interesting and depressing. Not just for the data.. For the evidence it contains of the human shortcomings that stand in the way of our solving the problem. Because this chart is a lie.
I noticed it after a few seconds, because I’ve seen honest versions of this chart before. But the difference is subtle.
Hint: If you click through to the source page at whitehouse.gov the lie isn’t there. It was introduced in the Tumblr version of the chart, presumably by the person running @smdxn, presumably because they thought it made the image more impactful, more motivating. This version does a better job of promoting fear and concern, but it does so by deceiving you.
Did you find the lie?
It’s the label circled in red at the center of the chart. On the original version of the chart it says “Carbon Dioxide Levels”, because the red line it is labeling is the line with the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide readings. That’s the number that has trended steadily upward for the last century as humanity has systematically pumped CO2 into the atmosphere. (The chart smooths out the annual wiggle in the data as Northern Hemisphere foliage sucks up and releases carbon, but that’s a legitimate simplification that helps visualize the underlying trend.)
The gray bars represent the ice-core-derived global temperature readings, sometimes up, sometimes down, but generally upward. But that data is messier, reflecting the many complexities, some of them not yet fully understood, of the global climate system. It’s still trending upward, and we’re still fucked. But it’s not quite as obvious. Also, it doesn’t have that sexy red color that we’re evolutionarily predisposed to react to emotionally: bright red = scary/important.
So for this version of the chart @smdxn switched the label so it reads “Global Temperature.” They also removed the red coloring from the numbers along the right side of the chart, presumably because that helps sell the deception that the red line refers to temperature rather than to CO2. So now, at least from a quick glance, it looks like the red line shows global temperature tracking steadily and scarily upward. Omg! We need to do something!
For a committed partisan, that deception probably seemed justified. The fact that global temperature has been climbing in fits and starts means that dishonest people on the other side like to cherry-pick particular slices of time in which temperature has held steady or even fallen for a few years and make a big deal about it. If you’ve ever come across an Internet commenter attacking the comments section of an article with references to “the hiatus”, that’s what they were talking about. And that’s clearly dishonest and deceptive. You don’t do that kind of cherry-picking on accident. But neither do you re-label a graph to switch the meaning of the two sets of data it shows on accident. The person who did that here intended to deceive.
Why does it matter that some activist decided it was okay to make this chart deceptive rather than communicative? That it was more important that the person viewing it be alarmed than that they understand?
It matters because of the scale of the problem. As long as we’re fighting politics-as-usual battles with each other, we’re losing this war. There’s just no way to make the kinds of changes we need to make unless we have not just a scientific consensus, but a societal consensus. The kind of partisanship that @smdxn is engaging in by deceptively relabeling the chart works against achieving that consensus.
There’s a reason why a scientific consensus on this issue exists. Science has rules, and a process, and when you do it right it allows the truth to win out over noise and human bias and self-interest. Society as currently constituted doesn’t have that rule. Or it does, but it’s more of a fragile guideline, one that gets trampled underfoot as soon as partisans start doing their rugby scrum back and forth over it.
Partisans think it’s okay to lie as long as they’re lying in the service of their cause. That’s why Peter Gleick thought it was okay to forge a sexier, more evil-sounding “strategy memo” to be released along with the internal documents he’d stolen from The Heartland Institute. That’s why Roger Pielke, Jr., gets maligned as “one of them” for saying top-down carbon pricing solutions can’t work given political economy as it currently operates. That’s why Naomi Oreskes recently called it “denialism” for climate scientists to say nuclear power needs to be part of our strategy. In each of those cases, partisans are stooping to deception precisely because they are partisans, because they are engaged in battle, because the people on the other side are doing it too, and that gets them upset and clouds their judgement.
For a committed partisan, lies become just another tool in service to the cause.
It’s a mistake. As long as there are two sides to this issue, we lose. We need to understand each other, to listen to each other, if we’re going to solve this. Lying won’t get it done, and those who engage in it are deluding themselves. They’re not part of the solution. They’re part of the problem.
–these would be the lyrics that are ruining my night–
I’m actually hearing the lyric as “to her we do return / and the future is inside us”. But I could totally be wrong. And either way, yeah.
I’m going to upload the version of the song I’ve been listening to, which I made by merging the audio of a couple of different youtube videos, along with my best guess on the lyrics. Looking forward to hearing it in finished form.
A crescent Moon being photobombed by a crescent Venus
(Image by Pál Váradi Nagy)
Attention Tumblr: The photographer has emailed me to complain that his caption for the original image is not being distributed with this version. This is problematic in that the caption reveals that this is a composite image, in which Venus has been moved much closer to the moon than the two bodies actually were in the original. See: A Brief Notice About My Crescents Picture.
It’s an interesting example of the “Tumblr lies” thing, in that it’s tough to spot the deception, since there’s no particular reason to be suspicious that this doesn’t depict an actual close conjunction/occultation. But still; a post with a cool-but-deceptive caption wins out over the truth. Again. For shame @nomorelittlewhitegloves (unless you were yourself deceived by someone upstream from whom you took your caption, though in that case you’re guilty of not crediting whomever that was, so for shame yet again).
But also shame on me for passing it on and adding to global wrongness.
Do this for every informative/news-related post you want to reblog. The fewer reblogs a false report gets, the less it spreads.
The best thing you can do for a false report is not reblog it at all, OR start your own post to debunk it, with a link to the original. If you reblog to debunk it, your reply will get lost in the huge amount of notes, and you will just end up spreading the misinformation further.
Sometimes a totally unlikely story turns out to be true! It’s even more fun to reblog it when you’ve confirmed that it’s real.
We all slip up sometimes but hey do what you can folks. Only you can prevent Tumblr fires.
