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NotActuallyALonghorn

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  1. Qidi X-plus3 runs about $500 and is pretty much plug and play with the capability to print carbon fiber reenforced nylon. 1kg of PLA runs about $20-30. The more engineering grade materials will run twice that or more, and many of them will need to be dried in a dehydrator before and possibly during printing. But you can print out all the parts you need to roll your own stuff for things like that if you can force heating elements and other electronic bits.
  2. Cut little pet door in the wall and find a cat to live in there. The body heat should keep it warm enough to prevent freezing.
  3. So, if you accidentally shoot down a friendly while flying your jet, do you get to paint a tiny silhouette of it below your cockpit?
  4. And Gregg County is notable absent from the list of confirmed mountain lion sightings...
  5. No one was reporting sightings of black lynx? I'm not sure I've seen that claim. A google search in this case is pretty useless, as pretty much all the results are going to be recent. But, as I said earlier, I'm not saying we have any melanistic cougars now. I'm saying it's very possible that melanistic cougars may have existed once (among other explanations for black panthers). Whether or not the eastern cougar once existed as a subspecies of mountain lion has been debated for quite some time, but the simple fact is we have very little data to say either way. It is very possible that Gloger's Rule applied to populations in the southeast and there were melanistic cats before they became extirpated a hundred years or so ago. There are not just historic accounts of sightings, but accounts of them being killed. The reality is we have no way of knowing what existed other than going off of historic accounts. We have areas in Texas where melanistic deer are much more common. It is certainly possible that the same was true of mountain lions in the south. Unfortunately they were extirpated along with their genetic footprint. The current populations of big cats being seen are primarily western migrants, which wouldn't have the same evolutionary pressure to preserve any melanistic mutations in their gene pool. Of course, there are several other options for those historic accounts. Ocelots are known to have had populations extending into Arkansas and Louisiana historically. I believe fossils have been discovered in Florida. They are known to have a melanistic color morph. Bobcats are also known to have a melanistic color morph. One study in Florida encountered them at a rate of .5%. Either one of those could account for some of the stories of black panthers. Bobcats could also account for some of the sightings. But mostly it is probably a combination of a lot of things that lead to false sightings. People see what they want to see. As far as the claim of no documentation of melanistic or black mountain lions goes, the vast majority of biologists are not in fact historians. They don't read primary documentation, they just repeat what other non-historian biologists have told them.
  6. Cobbling is repairing shoes. Cordwaining is making them.
  7. We need roflbox or someone experienced in roofing to compare the width of a shingle to the length of the cat.
  8. There wasn't documentation of a melanistic morph of a lynx until 2020. It is quite possible that there existed once for the mountain lion in the south where it would be advantageous. But those populations were estimated for the most part.
  9. Yeah, you are clearly just talking out of your ass. But what does a person who actually went to school to be a wildlife biologist know? Anyhow, I'm not saying there are currently any, but we shouldn't dismiss the historical record so easily. For instance, the Mexican Jaguar is known to have a melanistic morph, and we really don't have a ton of information on their historical range.
  10. Saw one on the side of Will Smith Road outside Longview about fifteen years ago. As far as black panthers or melanistic mountain lions or whatever, the historical record shouldn't be so easily dismissed. There are many claims of them being shot or people seeing the skins of ones that others shot.
  11. A missed opportunity to use the word defenestrate at the least. I'm disappointed in Mr Canecutter.
  12. Enjoyed the first two. Gonna make the oldest watch, she will hopefully love it and get into Clone Wars and Rebels.
  13. Little miss NAAL (age 8): Do blue and green make yellow? NAAL: No. They make blue green. A little while later... NAAL to Mrs NAAL: What do you get if you mix blue and green? Mrs NAAL: Yellow. ...
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