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Everything posted by Pods
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I'll take the over. The shining city on the hill is burning all around us and too many Americans are mistaking the fire for the light. When there is nothing left to burn, we will find ourselves well into the new Dark Ages.
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Damn, that's at least 9 eggs. We really are the Joneses.
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Did anyone else hear that explosion just now in North Austin?
Pods replied to hornbri's topic in Daily Texan
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He likes Asian girls?
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Last one and I'll quit hijacking the thread with La Brea chat, but this helps show how absurd the preservation is. This a 3D model of a 14,000 year old leaf cutter bee made from very high resolution CT scans. Each slice is 3 microns thick. Left is the eye, right is the abdomen. The flat spot in the middle is one of the wings. There are individual pollen grains and full internal organ system preserved. There is so much preserved detail, scanning and processing them crashed a supercomputer. Red arrow is the eye. Blue is the wing. Orange is the abdomen.
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For anyone that hasn't been, it's a small museum, but definitely worth the admission price. All the outside stuff is free and you can often see a crew digging in one of the pits. La Brea is what's called a predator trap. Something gets stuck and predators show up to eat it. They get stuck and other things show up to eat them and also get stuck. As a result, there are lot of dire wolves (over 4,000) and other predators. Each bone in this picture is the same Golden Eagle foot bone from a different fossil specimen. Bones like this are so fragile, they almost never preserve. It really is incredible. You'll never see another museum like it.
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Here's a cladogram from the Nature paper, you can think of it as a family tree. From left to right is time. The branches show how closely related they are to each other. Each place the branches diverge represents the common ancestor for that group and the number represents how many millions of years ago the split occurred. For example, Andean foxes split from everyone else 6.8 million years ago. Dire wolves split from everyone else 5.7 million years ago. The grey wolf is WAY up the family tree from dire wolves. They are not very close at all.
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Every press release this company has had is techbro bullshit. They are hyping up the same thing with elephants and saying they will make mammoths. When you see the next one from the same company, it's going to be bullshit too. What this company is doing is not science, it's pumping up their share price. They used a program called CRISPR to make 20 edits to 14 genes (out of at least 20,000 functional genes) of a modern gray wolf. It's not 99.9% gray wolf, it's a gray wolf. @LTbear might have more insight, but it doesn't look at all like a dire wolf to me. My favorite museum display in the world is at the La Brea Tar Pits. ~400 dire wolf skulls all mounted on the same backlit wall. I couldn't calculate the number of hours I've spent looking at the variation between those skulls. The snout of these gray wolves is way too small and gracile. Plus, recent DNA work (2021) suggests that modern wolves are not the closest living relatives of dire wolves. Dire wolves are evolutionarily closer to jackals and African wild dogs than modern wolves. We share more DNA with chimpanzees than wolves share with dire wolves. Here's a pdf of the Nature paper. https://tinylink.net/gHM90 Science magazine's take. https://www.science.org/content/article/legendary-dire-wolf-may-not-have-been-wolf-all That pdf is freely available online and got enough publicity that Colossal is definitely aware of it. If they wanted to be accurate, they should have modified jackal DNA to reconstruct this, but that wouldn't generate an absurd share price for the company.
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Texas Becoming an AI-Powered Surveillance State
Pods replied to Horn Under a Bad Sign's topic in Cloak Room
Michael, Jermaine AND Randy Jackson (not that Randy Jackson). Rockwell's dad was CEO of Motown Records, though they were supposedly estranged at the time. I'm assuming that opened a few doors for him. -
Split a cooked hot dog down the middle making two halves. Top with mashed potatoes. Top with cheese and bake until cheese is melted.
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That sucks. Unreinforced brick buildings are a nightmare in an earthquake. The mortar crumbles.
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Elon Musk: Nazi traitor piece of shit [Confirmed]
Pods replied to MaybeACoordinator's topic in Daily Texan
None of us had a problem playing as Lara Croft. -
Some great advice already on this thread. I started helping my mom with her team of 12-13 year old girls part way into the season and it was really fun. This is going to be long, but some of the stuff I did could be applicable and this will echo some of the advice already given. Be the hype man and make them feel confident. Don't ask them to do something they can't. It's easier to keep their confidence up, than it is to rebuild it. Make sure to praise rebounds, defense, picks and hustle after loose balls just as much as you do assists and scoring. Be loud and excited when they do something well. Your players will notice and start doing the same thing naturally, which gels your team chemistry. Let them know it's okay to make mistakes, as long as they are giving full effort. Frame mistakes as something you are confident they will get better at, rather than something they screwed up. We had 2 good guards, so we pressed every possession until the game was out of hand and I started to feel bad. None of the other 12-13 year old girls teams could handle relentless full-court pressure, your 10-year old opponents are going to have no chance. It's a lot of fun for the kids and we got a lot of turnovers leading to easy baskets. On O, we kept it simple and ran whenever possible. When forced into a half-court we mostly ran picks for our 2 best offensive threats to shoot or pass out of. Get the other kids good at picks and boxing out for rebounds and be vocally proud of them when they do them well. Same treatment as a made basket. Some of your kids that can't dribble may be able to shoot from particular spots. Passing off a pick and roll is a great way to get an open look for them at that spot. Keep it simple and restricted to stuff each kid can actually do. We spent a lot of practice time on defense and running the court after turnovers/rebounds. Our focus was 1) turnovers, 2) no close shots. Make the other team try to beat you with long jumpers. Long jumpers are not only harder for them to make, but also result in longer rebounds that are easier to generate fast break points off of. Teach any zone concepts by drawing a circle around them in practice and running low speed drills. Guard this circle and don't leave it is much easier for them to visualize than the idea of guarding a zone. Chalk works, but it's slippery. Try a dry erase marker on an inconspicuous part of the court first. You can also use small cones, or something similar to mark out the circle, just run drills at slow speed, so no one slips, or trips. If your kids mostly get the concept of staying in their circle down, you can throw stuff at the other team they have never seen before. I originally wanted to play a 2-3 and make the other team hit jumpers, but the other team usually only has 1 or 2 good players and "junk" defenses turned out to be lethal. We were losing the first game I helped with, so I turned up the press and installed a triangle and 2 at halftime. Even that first time, with no actual practice time running it, we forced more mistakes than we made and ran the other team out of the gym. It's just your 2 best athletes in man against their 2 best, and your other three clogging the paint, defending their circle and not leaving it. Intercept passes when they can, but base assignment is clog up their circle. Your kids in zone can make some mistakes, because you've already locked up the other team's best players in man-to-man. Very few (if any) teams will have a 3rd player that can reliably handle the ball and score. Triangle and 2 also turned out to be a great D to fall back into if they beat your press, because your bigs will have already gotten back to set up in zone and your guards will already be in man-to-man. When we got better at it, other teams completely lost their shit trying to play against it. The other team's best players start to make mistakes and that spirals. We got tons of turnovers setting up fast break points, so we ran it a lot more than I'd originally intended. Once you know the makeup of your team and what they are good/bad at, post again. We'll be able to give more specific advice.
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That same "uncertainty" is highly lucrative to those with inside information on said "uncertainty".
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Elon Musk: Nazi traitor piece of shit [Confirmed]
Pods replied to MaybeACoordinator's topic in Daily Texan
It's been a while since I took an anthropology course, but there is pretty solid fossil evidence in multiple clades suggesting they cared for injured or aged individuals. Neanderthals (Shanidar Cave is a notable example), anatomically modern humans and others I can't recall off the top of my head. Evolution, by definition, responds only to selection pressures and lacks a a pre-determined trajectory, but this forced devolution of human decency has both a very obvious pre-determined trajectory and obvious instigators. It's a shame so many people refuse to see it. -
The asteroid that killed most of what you think of as dinosaurs was ~6-9 miles in diameter. It killed ~75% of life on earth, but a bunch of dinosaurs still made it through. There are currently twice as many bird species, as there are mammal species. This thing sounds like a baby at 100-300 feet across, but that puts the minimum estimate (100 foot diameter) as a Tunguska explosion sized blast, which would be cataclysmic regionally. For reference, Hiroshima was ~16 kilotons, Nagasaki was ~21 kilotons. The Tunguska explosion happened in 1908 in the middle of Siberia. Tunguska was 3-50 megatons, most common estimate is ~15 megatons, close to 1000X the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Tunguska may have been an asteroid, or maybe a comet, but whatever it was, likely airburst at an altitude of ~6 miles. It leveled ~800 sq. miles of trees and charred ~100 sq. miles of trees adjacent to the blast. People felt the explosion in London and were able to see the light from it on the east coast of the US. 15 megatons is the most common estimate for Tunguska, so here's a nuke map estimate of a 15 megaton explosion hitting Houston. 100% probability of 3rd degree burns all the way from Sugar Land to La Porte. Again, this is the minimum predicted size, the asteroid could be up to 3X bigger. If this asteroid does hit, it's going to obliterate anything it hits, so hope for the ocean. The track posted upthread goes right over Mumbai, Calcutta and everything in between them, then Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. All of those are ~20 million each. Also Lagos at >13 million, Bogota at >10 million among others. For even the minimum possible size estimate, if it hit one of them, the death toll would be in the millions. NASA made physical contact with a ~500 foot asteroid a couple of years ago, so hopefully no one working on that project has been purged. That institutional knowledge could wind up being pretty important.
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You know how you can flush a toilet by quickly dumping a bucket of water into it? Y'all, I just did that with my ass. Came out with so much force, it smashed back and hit 2/3 of the way up the lid. Not the seat. The lid. I did think it was pretty considerate of me to courtesy flush for myself.
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One of the not fun parts of field work is taking a shit in a port-a-potty with crazy strong winds shaking the shit out of you, and everything else. We refer to it as riding the rocket. I started Gavilyte a few hours ago and the taste isn't that bad with the lemon flavoring, but I'm riding the rocket tonight. Procedure is in 10 hours and I'm fucking starving. Chicken broth earlier, about to have green jello and a different brand of chicken broth for dinner for variety. If this is the worst of it, I'm really glad I'm finally doing this. It's not fun, but much better than I expected.
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I'm so sorry Brisket. Your dad sounds like he was an amazing human being. Y'all were lucky to have him and his legacy lives on in you and your kids. Loss of a loved one hits like a freight train when it first hits, but these things get easier with time. Never goes away, but it does get easier to bear. May memories of your father carry you until then.
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U.S. Surgeon General Issues New Advisory on Link Between Alcohol and Cancer Risk
Pods replied to tigol's topic in Daily Texan
and that you hang out with polydactyl cats. -
What new UT gear are you looking to buy this year?
Pods replied to GhostOfTomJoad's topic in Football
What do you expect when you send a package through a vacation destination like Woodbridge, IL? You are competing against Cypress Grove Aquatic Park and Seven Bridges Ice Arena, dude. You'll be lucky if your jersey ever gets tired of Woodbridge. I'd order another one and this time, make sure it ships through Oklahoma. -
They showed a longer clip later. Bielema did the "substitution penalty" with arms extended as soon as he left his own sideline and continued it the entire way across the field.
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They don't have much depth, so Rocket Sanders sitting out killed their running game and they rely on RPOs pretty heavily.
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Illinois had been subbing late and Beamer was complaining to the refs about it. There was an injured Illinois player on the South Carolina side of the field. Bielema waddled across the field with arms extended in a "substitution penalty" taunting Beamer. Then continued to do so, rather than checking on his injured player. No flag. Beamer was pissed, went ape shit and was yelling at the refs "you saw that", and yelling at Bielema for being trash.
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