I’ve never seen a tattoo artist take a credit card. In my experience they’ve been cash only with a deposit upfront.

I’m working on my campaign slogans: “Biden, lookin’ out for the ladies 👀”

Back in 2021, I read a handful of Philip K. Dick books. I have always loved the movies that were based on them, but I was very surprised by the contents of the books. I found that he constantly derided women and portrayed blindly supporting the police, regardless of their intentions. I did enjoy the books overall, but I’m not as quick to praise him these days.

Because it’s both! Genes have never been wholly predictive of behavior. People have just wanted them to be.

The issue is thinking of genetics as prescriptive. Genetics simply influence behavior and setup initial probabilities.

Plus the distinction with breed and behavior with dogs isn’t as extreme as most people think. Yes, some breeds do have some genes that do influence behavior, but most people don’t even know what kind of dog they have unless they have purebred documents.

Here’s a great article from Ars Technica with a survey of thousands of dogs and linking their genes to behaviors. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/genetics-goes-to-the-dogs-finds-theres-not-much-to-breed-behavior/

What we know vs. what we believe

One of the caveats here may be that people who own purebred dogs may have expectations regarding their behavior and interpret things the dogs do accordingly. And there’s some evidence for that. Golden retrievers have a reputation for being friendly dogs, and the owners of retrievers tend to say that their pets don’t fear strangers. But the researchers were able to identify mutts with significant golden retriever ancestry and find that the behavior of these dogs is all over the map.

Despite that caveat, a few behaviors appear to have a significant genetic component, and some of these behaviors have been partially selected for in some specific breeds. But there are two reasons to expect that the genetics of these behaviors would be complicated. As the researchers point out, the first is that most modern breeds only originated about 150 years ago, so the number of generations to fix subtle features like behaviors have been too few.

The second issue is that, in humans, complicated behaviors tend to be shaped by many genetic factors that, individually at least, have a weak influence. There’s no real reason to expect that it would be different in dogs, making it significantly harder to select for that behavior in a breed.

For actual dog owners, you can rest assured that there is a real genetic influence on some breed behaviors. And, if your own dog seems to be a complete mutant when it comes to its behavior… well, there’s a chance it is.

I think they still have the strength, but it’s the cavitation underwater that does most of the damage.

Edit: so the answer is no, it’s about half as strong in air. This is a great article and has more details about the punch itself.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/when-the-medium-matters-the-mighty-mantis-shrimp-pulls-its-punch-in-air/

It’s a pretty bad sign when your own partymates can’t stand you. Maybe it’s because “Republican” just means “hateful” now?

What are they going to do at the retreat anyway, discuss how much they dislike everything? Sounds like a real downer to me.

Most people wait a whole year for their birthday

The Jerboa network error had me on the ground and the JSON html string error finished me off.