ChickenLadyLovesLife

FWIW I used to hang out with behavioral psychology grad students, who were in the Skinnerian tradition of operant conditioning research. They mostly worked with pigeons, and to transport the birds they used juice pitchers with a few air holes cut into the bottom. I asked them once how they got the birds into the pitchers and they laughed and showed me: they would just open the bird's cage and hold the pitcher up and the birds would dive head-first into the pitcher, sometimes knocking themselves out in the process.

As part of the research protocol, the birds were kept on a diet that included about 80% of their normal caloric intake; the rest of their food was provided by the reinforcements of the experiments themselves (this was done to maximize the reinforcement effect of the rewards). So those birds were way the fuck into those experiments. To add to that, these students were all behavioral pharmacologists, so in addition to getting food reinforcement the birds were also getting drugs like cocaine and heroin.

BTW a lot of people confuse the operant conditioning research with the people who put animals into cages and shock them. This is definitely not what BF Skinner was all about. In fact he wrote books on the subject of how punishment is a bad thing for all animals (including humans and pigeons).

I would have said "wasn't Pavlov the guy who had a dog named Ruby Begonia?" and even the prof wouldn't have known what the fuck I was talking about.

It's true that they're not political actors. They're political whores. And they're not even high-priced whores.

Survey Monkey?

Looks like the cartoon version of the Looksmaxxing dude. Even down to the self-inflicted cheekbone damage.

Whillikers! It's so big.

I wrote mobile apps for Blackberry back in the day. As part of their security fixation, all library modules you incorporated had to be signed as your app was compiling, even if you were just testing out a single line change. This could make your app take upwards of a whole hour to sign, if the signing servers were even up and running at all; they were often down completely which meant I could go home and get high instead of working. Which is why I never badmouthed Blackberry to my bosses.

The absurdity of having every module signed meant that I had to think long and hard about whether I wanted to use built-in library functionality or just roll my own code. For one UI I needed to use trigonometry functions. These were located (logically or not) in one of the encryption modules which were especially prone to taking a long time to sign, so I ended up writing my own sin()function (in Java) just to save myself ten minutes of compilation time.

They're making so much money that they're still opening Starbuckses across the street from Startbuckses. Make it make sense.

I'll pledge allegiance to the Constitution -- y'know, like politicians and judges do when they're sworn in to office. The flag hasn't even been the same damn thing for all 250 years.

One under-appreciated aspect of leaf design is that in addition to being able to spread out and absorb sunlight, they also need to be of a shape such that in a strong wind they tend to curl up on themselves and provide a minimum of wind resistance. Otherwise their collective sail effect would tend to uproot the tree. Fortunately, there are lots of beautiful ways to solve these related problems.

Just replace "togas" with "mass graves" and we're good to go.

Shit, I remember when Nixon resigned. I also remember thinking that Nixon was as bad as Republicans could ever get.