Han Shot First

Really importantly though, this led to the widespread implementation of smoke alarms (which had been rare and prohibitively expensive in the 1960s), along with building codes that greatly reduced fire risk, and use of less flammable materials in furniture and construction so that when a fire did happen, people had more time to react and evacuate, reducing fatalities.

Science and Regulation. Saved. Lives.

I made a bat comic and now you have to look at it

Pennsylvania is currently working on its budget, and one of if not THE main sticking point is funding for public transit—all transit in the state, but mainly for SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which serves Philadelphia and its surrounding counties and is facing a $213 million budget deficit. The PRT, which serves Pittsburgh, is also in danger.

As of this morning, SEPTA has to start the process of cutting services by 45%—canceling some train and bus lines entirely, implementing a 9pm curfew on subway lines, reducing frequency, and canceling sporting event services (all of our professional league stadiums are accessible by one subway line and a significant number of fans take it)—all because politicians in rural counties have been demonizing SEPTA as a “chauffeur service for city residents” that doesn’t benefit the rest of the commonwealth. I am not joking. A state rep literally sent a letter to constituents describing buses that way.

But what is so fucking infuriating to me is that at one of the rallies, I learned ONE SIMPLE FACT that, in my mind, should have ended the entire debate: Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties are the only revenue-positive counties in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The money to fix roads and bridges in every other county comes from Philadelphia’s economy, which is supported by the fact that people take the train in from collar counties to work here, and people go to sporting events here and spend money, and residents who are paying significantly higher rents than anywhere else in the state but still living in poverty can get to their jobs without having a car. (Not to mention the fact that our cash-strapped education department saves money by having kids take SEPTA instead of school buses.)

If no agreement is reached and these cuts fully go into effect—some of them are starting by the end of the month and a second round in January—it very well may cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue, which will have reverberating effects on every county in the commonwealth, including the poorest who are most reliant on state funding.

The filter relies on manually curated open-source blocklists, including the ‘nuclear’ list, provided by uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist,” DuckDuckGo said in a post on X. “While it won’t catch 100% of AI-generated results, it will greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see.

I had planned to do something totally different with my day but instead I made a whole bunch of pride birds! I plan to put them on Redbubble asap.

ADDITIONAL BIRBS

Sapphic: red-tailed comet Aromantic: dusky-headed conure

Guess who! Lesbian cockatoo. :)

Finally! The Vosmaeri eclectus for the polyamory flag. While not an orientation or gender identity, the polyam flag is still very popular at pride events.

I thought the eclectus was perfect for this flag because unlike other parrots, they’re nonmonogamous. What a fun coincidence that they happen to match the flag so well and to be a personal favorite of mine.

Genderfluid violet-backed starling! I had a lot of fun drawing this one; I’m getting less afraid to draw iridescence on birds.

Adding the MLM bird again because he got missed by the reblog train last time. (Here’s the post where I added him.) And, at long last, the bird for the intersex flag!

Velociraptors are social animals, with learned traits they didn't learn at the park. The park's raptors don't know how to work as a team or live in a pack, because they had no adults to teach them. That's why you have adult raptors keeping the juveniles away from the food, or attacking baby raptors.

The deterioration of the 2nd island's dinosaur population was due to a prion disease. Park organisers bought the cheapest feed (derived from scrapie infected sheep) without considering the consequences, and the populations were collapsing because a prion disease called DX had become endemic.

None of the people running the park understood the biology of the animals they were keeping. They were concerned with having a static, point-in-time population, not a functioning ecosystem. So when the dinosaurs started breeding, they had no idea what to do.

Similarly, they were more interested in the environments as dioramas for visitor viewing than as ecosystems for the animals. They kept predators isolated and tossed all the herbivores together ("it's not like they're gonna eat each other!") rather than studying their behavior to decide which dinosaurs to put where.

They picked plants based on the prehistoric aesthetic they wanted rather than their actual properties. Remember the sick triceratops? It was sick because it ate a poisonous plant. Ellie figured that out because her area of study was paleobotany. She also figured out that some of the plants around the family-friendly swimming pool were highly toxic. Nobody double checked the plants they used for their impacts on visitors or the dinosaurs.

They had hundreds of animals and no staff ecologists. They had 1 veterinarian. Instead of having paleontologists on staff, they had a big game hunter. All their biologists worked in the lab. They built everything like theme park rides because automation kept labor costs down and made secrecy easier.