Andon

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

Groundhog day, groundhog day, groundhog day...

A suit and tie?

Wait, wrong wasp

Oh no, what a shame!

And for that, you deserve a little treat

Sissy sport my ass.

Yeah sure a football player could flatten me, but a figure skater has enough knowledge of how joints work to rip my limbs off with no effort.

They'll also look a lot nicer when doing it too, at least I'd go out in style.

I hope you're not pissed about that

Facebook also has some excellent bird groups

You as a kid - Puts a piece of plywood over a cinderblock at the bottom of a hill that leads into a gravel ditch that leads into the woods to make a bike jump.

You as an adult - My kid will never do something ridiculous like climb furniture to reach a toy.

A downy woodpecker sits on a spruce on a sunny winter day. "Ahh... Febuary" it says. Close up on it correcting "Febrary" then "Febberary..." then finally "Frebrury"

Ferbruary #oldknees

Looks egg-cellent to me

That's eleven years. Eleven!

Went all the way to the other side of the world and still couldn't escape the snow

Yeah, that's definitely some significant artificial selection there.

Still, I have a soft spot for both them and pigeons because they both essentially require us to exist, and only exist because of us (In one way or another)

I really like house sparrows. Pigeons? We adapted them to our needs.

House sparrows? They just followed us and adapted. Plus, their chirp is just "Tweet" - I'd be surprised if it *wasn't* the reason we say birds go "Tweet"

Yeah, there's a bunch of them out there and every one is hilarously named

THIS WAS SIX YEARS AGO!?

It's note-worthy

Oh, I think you're right. Banana and chocolate are enough flavor by themselves, I don't think cinnamon is needed.

My partner's mom is going to love this

Anyway that's my rant. I'm going to go back outside and shovel more snow.

Dark Matter is a silly name. We all know this and nobody pretends otherwise.

Which means in fiction, we get... pretty wild things attached to it. It's basically SciFi Magic Things. What can it do? Whatever the plot demands! Incidentally, this is the opposite of what it actually does: Almost Nothing

Is dark matter a "thing"? Sure. It describes a hole in our knowledge.

But a lot of the communication around it sets it as a Certified Fact that Dark Matter exists, when. Maybe it doesn't? I certainly don't know.

And on THAT note, let's get into fiction and media!

We have good but not perfect knowledge of a lot of things. Maybe our knowledge looks really good in most places, but wherever Dark Energy and Dark Matter show up it's just the holes in the swiss cheese lining up.

SO.

There's a historic measurement of the earth (I can't find exact info so I won't cite things wrong) that is remarkably close. However, there's a few errors in the calculations that end up countering each other out.

Our modern scientific knowledge could be similar

THAT is my complaint.

Is there *something* that's interacting with stuff? YES. We can measure that! But there's... many ways it could be explained. Many of them poorly mind you, but it could be as "simple" as... our understanding of gravity is wrong. Let's look at history.

In any other field, if you said "Hey, there's this thing. It only affects this one small slice of stuff. Despite throwing the best stuff I have at it, I can't find any good proof of it", then the answer would be. "Maybe the thing doesn't exist and the answer to that effect lies elsewhere"

And THAT-

Science! opinion: Dark Matter/Dark Energy *pisses me off* to no end.

One: It sounds so dumb. But I'm not going to dive into that.

Two: Welllllll.....

Banana-chocolate marble cake?!

(Also can confirm banana bread freezes quite well)