Steve McWeasel

They don't seem eager for a sip of contamination smoothie!

While shark teeth tend to get a lot of attention, it’s the teeth on their skin that you should brush up on! Shark skin is covered in tiny, flat pointed scales that are called dermal denticles—which literally means skin teeth. If you look at a shark’s skin under a microscope, you’ll see that the scales are a series of overlapping teeth that result in a rough texture.

These pointed scales reduce drag on sharks as they swim, making them stealthy and fast as they cut through the water. This jagged texture also keeps fouling animals (like barnacles) from being able to settle on their bodies and slow them down, which is helpful when you’re a speedy top predator. 

the north american red wolf is only slightly larger than a coyote and looks like a german shepard that’s wondering if it maybe left the oven on, but they are true wolves!

But “I’m guilty of theft and carrying a knife in my pocket, not armed robbery” is not something you can say to a jury or to a prosecutor and receive even the slightest grace.

“I, a small time drug dealer with no weapon, am guilty of briefly locking a drug buyer in the car with me (who had initially entered totally voluntarily) for 30 seconds while we argued angrily about the price of a dimebag of cocaine. I’m not guilty of robbery, premeditated kidnapping and ‘wrongful imprisonment’” is not a perfectly true story you’re allowed to tell anyone.

And we’re strongly pressured not to show any sympathy or fair-mindedness to these people because they were unashamed scofflaws who knowingly broke laws, and because they’ve probably (but not provably) committed a few other minor crimes. But I do! I do have sympathy for them! I don’t think it’s fair or reasonable for people who committed fifty-buck crimes to get five grand worth of punishment. And I don’t think it’s ever acceptable to nudge my uncertain estimation of someone in the direction of ‘guilty’ because there are stereotypes or demographics that indicate they’re statistically more likely than me or other comfortable relatively-privileged people to have committed other crimes.

For one just because in and of itself it’s disproportionate. But also because almost everyone has committed fifty-buck crimes in their life if you were to laser focus on every single moment of their life and interpret every thing they’ve ever done in the absolute least charitable light possible. Almost everyone has committed rudeness/roughness you could call assault & battery; or ‘forgotten’ to make payments for something in a way you could call financial fraud; or briefly possessed and given to friends just barely enough of a drug you could call it drug trafficking. Only an unlucky handful of people get caught for the trivial crimes we all commit, but they’re very often treated firstly as if they committed a much more serious offense, and secondly painted as if they were a habitual or career criminal rather than an incidental and possibly even unintentional one.