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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Did the mushroom learn to control a robot, or did the scientists figure out how to connect a robot to a mushroom in such a way as to make the regular processes happening inside the mushroom trigger a set of robot legs? Because the article makes it seem like the mushroom is intelligent and has agency, and was thus far only lacking the proper robot body in order to express that; but the video makes it look like the legs were all pumping in unison, and the resulting movement was more or less coincidental.









  • Are they genuinely trying to stifle education, or is it all just racist bullshit?

    That’s the fun part: stifling education is the racist bullshit.

    They’ve been anti-education since desegregation. Back in the ‘60s the Religious Right, particularly Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and the people in that orbit, tried really hard to go through the courts and use their freedom of religion under the First Amendment to keep black people out of their church-based schools. Obviously they lost, but they have never forgotten how the mean ol’ federal government defiled their perfect little angels by forcing them sit next to some filthy negro while they learn their multiplication tables or whatever. Ever since then they’ve made it their mission to destroy public education.

    By the 1980s that Evangelical movement had become fully ingrained into the Republican party, and that drive to destroy public education came with it. It’s what’s behind the push for charter schools. It’s what’s behind the push for private school vouchers. It’s what’s behind Evangelicals astroturfing school board meetings, and sometimes taking over the school board itself. It’s a big part of why public schools (inner city public schools in particular) have been chronically underfunded for longer than I’ve been alive. It was racism the whole time.

    But yeah, whenever I hear a conservative use the word “woke,” I’ve found you can pretty much always mentally transpose “woke” with “ni–er stuff” (or “fa–ot stuff,” depending on the context) and whatever they’re trying to say suddenly makes a lot more sense.


  • Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mloctopus
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    2 months ago

    You do have the benefit of being right though.

    The word octopus is a classical Greek word that comes to English via Latin. The Greek plural is octopodes, the Latin plural is octopi. But we don’t speak Latin or classical Greek. We speak English. Because octopus is the English word for octopus it follows the English rules for pluralization, which is to add “s” or “es” to the end of the word. Cases can be made why octopi and octopodes could be technically correct, but for English speakers octopuses is the most correct.





  • I don’t think it’s idiocy. I think it’s cruel people who delight in doing cruel things. And when a guy like Trump, who has managed to use cruelty to get rich and powerful, comes along and gives them permission to fully indulge their cruellest instincts, makes them feel like it’s right and good, they’ll follow that person straight into hell. They’re so excited to finally be able to go out and hurt all the people they don’t like that there really isn’t any line they’re not willing to cross anymore, no moral they’re not willing to betray, to finally get that.

    I don’t even refer to Evangelicals as Christians anymore. They are two different things at this point. If you look at modern Evangelical doctrine and compare it to the ministry Jesus laid down in the Gospels, they are just about as polar opposite as you can get while still name-checking Jesus. I don’t think it’s useful to conflate them anymore because real Christianity, using the actual words of Jesus, might be one of the few effective ways left to argue against all this Evangelical nonsense. I’m honestly surprised that the Christians with real faith aren’t already out there doing it.