Erin

they then did a poll for what grade listeners would give the country before the state of the union and expressed shock that the second most popular answer was F so their awareness of current events is questionable

hard-hitting Olympic commentary from the early morning talk radio hosts in this Uber
Host 1: USA beat Canada for gold in hockey!
Host 2: Wow! And Canada, they're know for their uhhh hockey

so stay tuned i guess

i've seen this game circulating for days and i've been avoiding it because i'm 70% animal fact by volume and the only two outcomes are 1) i don't get as many as i think i'm going to and shame my ancestors or 2) i become trapped in this game for the rest of time, endlessly listing new animals

Found an additional graphic that gets even more of these quotes together.

I've kept "I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees" pinned above my desk since I first started studying evolutionary biology as an undergraduate. So relatable to get extremely frustrated with your study system.

Thank you 😌

A snippet of a figure for a scientific paper. The white box labeling the graph is now perfectly aligned with the Y axis, and there is now a thumbs-up emoji indicating my satisfaction with having fixed this meaningless problem

No one but me cares about this

it doesn't show up in the Rstudio preview!! it exclusively exists if you save the graph!! it has haunted me for years and i'm NOT STANDING FOR IT ANYMORE

A snippet of a figure for a scientific paper. The white box that labels part of the graph is ever so slightly misaligned with the Y axis of the graph, leaving a small but infuriating gap. A red arrow pointing at the gap and two red question marks indicate my frustration with this gap

today in "skills learned out of spite", learning a vector graphic editing program to exclusively to fix this 3 pixel gap that R insists on leaving next to all my figure labels

a white crowned robin chat stands atop a book titled “a dumb birds field guide to the worst birds ever”

that’s it, i’ve finally taken my best photo of all time 😅

(this chubster is an unapologetic beggar so don’t feel bad for him)

🧪🌍 #bird #birb

Your guess is as good as mine. Probably SOME of them are as with most mammals (we saw one female perform typically male courtship behaviors to another female) but the whole species wouldn't last very long if they all were...

Unfortunately most people take away "evil stupid ugly scavengers" from that movie (which I otherwise love!) so you end up having conversations about why folks think hyenas are "mean" and "cruel" when they do the exact same thing every other predator in the world does

That guy came to the talk after this conversation and then slept through the whole thing. Net neutral interaction, zero information learned on either side, but I think of him often

shout out to the guy who came up to me and said "my buddy told me hyenas are gay" and I went "???? People thought they were hermaphrodites for a long time, is that what he meant?" And he went "no no, he said they were gay." And then neither of us knew how to proceed the conversation from there

I blame the Lion King for a huge amount of anti-hyena bias, at least among Westerners. It was gratifying tho because most people, after being shown sufficient baby hyena photos and told some fun facts, pivoted pretty quickly to excitement/interest and away from knee jerk disgust

When I was studying hyenas, we gave weekly educational talks at the local tourist lodge. It was remarkable how often those talks veered from "general hyena biology" to " humans love to assign human morals to animals and why we should stop"

A Black-capped Chickadee showcasing winter fashion by donning a snowflake accessory.

I spent a large portion of today trying to align a bunch of R plots in a grid that were like "what if we were always 5 pixels misaligned 👀" so 🤝 for sleeping on it

A screenshot of WhatsApp: Ash: Sebastián, I have one very pressing question. Sebastián Di Martino: Let me know Ash: Are jaguar soft? Sebastián Di Martino: They are very soft (two hearts on the answer)

Being a journalist is sick: I just contacted a pre-eminent jaguar conservationist in Argentine with a question that has been weighing on me for ages and he wrote back right away with an informed answer.

squirrel asleep in a little wooden house

Snowstorm #Goals from the @squirrel_boxes instagram 🥰😴 #sqrlpix

If it makes you feel any better, I've scared off a hyena by raising my arms and going "YAAA", and we often saw them get startled by songbirds flying over head

That said, they're the only predator that can take lions in a fight (with sufficient numbers) so buddy system was probably a good idea

Jupiter Ascending is buckwild start to finish (affectionate) but Channing Tatum's character is supposedly half albino and I leaned over to my friend in the theater and hissed "you can't BE half albino, that shit's recessive"

he's also half dog but I didn't feel qualified to comment on that bit

Not only a perfect denouement, it was the end of an era. Thirty years ago today, this strip was published.

A Canadian hostel owner in a Kenyan beach town warned my group we'd start to burn in about 20 minutes under the equatorial sun, then looked directly at me and went "Well. Maybe 15 minutes."

I'm just saying, during my fieldwork I handled a lot of squirrels who cleared the 700g threshold by a fair margin

Every time I see this image I imagine someone to the right, out of shot, with a really big saw.

Tweet by Jason @longwall26 My cat, an idiot: Those ornaments look exactly like my toys. Why can't I play with them? Me, pinnacle of animals: That felt frog wearing a top hat is to celebrate The Lord

Glad I saved this by @longwall26.bsky.social

"Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone. "When you look up the stage directions, it says, 'Exit Ariel.”

A story Stoppard told several times, in several places: