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Posted26 days ago
Key Takeaways
It seems we have failed to properly educate our children.
It is ignorance like this this makes me believe that civilization is doomed.
But we only have ourselves to blame
I get that the changing weather might change their habitual latitudes but there was and is always some "boundary" between the two, no? So there was always a boundary but it moves north or south depending on warming or cooling climates (these birds have been around for millions of years). How did they only mate now?
A lot of the differences between species is due to behavior issues, not actual physical difficulty. It's likely that both species of jay mate at different times or display different mating signals. They've been separated for something like 75 million years which leaves plenty of time for their behaviors to change.
(They have been renamed to "Canada Jay," but that's a hilarious story for another day)
>So, you know, it's theoretically possible, but we haven't seen the evidence of that yet.
When all you have is a hammer…
That's not snappy enough for the Onion really.
For example, believe climate change is quite real but have a poor intuition for its scale and timeline, which is why I am extra skeptical about the claim that these specific habitat changes are caused by climate change, and wonder what other factors may come into play. (I have the same reaction to climate events - if sloppy thinkers claim heat waves are evidence for climate change, then equally sloppy thinkers on the other side can claim cold snaps are evidence against. Both are wrong, and waste our time.)
Authors should speculate about alternative causal chains even if they eventually discard them. This builds trust. Unfortunately this good behavior is associated with climate change denialism, and so those who admit its reality simply don't offer an alternative even when the complexity of the situation is extremely high. The result, ironically, is just more badvocacy on both sides, more noise in the infospace, which ultimately means the "do nothing" side wins.
I get why the green jay’s habitat would have expanded northward (from more tropical areas) in a warming climate, but I don’t get why the blue jay’s habitat would have expanded west of Houston.
Like many places, central Texas is warmer than it used to be, and maybe drier, but I wouldn’t think you could call it more “temperate” now.
Obsolete/dialiectical English: to shudder with fear, or a shudder (related to "gruesome")
Computer games: in Zork, a monster that eats adventurers in the dark [0]
Linguistics: an English translation for words that cover the entire green-blue part of the spectrum (in languages that don't distinguish blue from green) [1]
Philosophy: a color name that is equivalent to green until a specific future time, at which point it becomes equivalent to blue (used to raise questions about how to validly extrapolate into the future) [2]
[0]: https://zork.fandom.com/wiki/Grue
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction#Grue_a...
French: grue may also crane both as the bird and the construction machine.
Italian: gru also means crane (bird).
Norwegian: grue may either mean the verb "to dread” or a noun meaning fireplace/hearth.
Gheg Albanian (dialect): grue means wife/woman.
Primarily Scottish but also Northern English (regionalism): (1) ground-gru / grue means a half-liquid snow or ice that forms and floats on the surface of a river, sometimes thought to have risen from the riverbed. (2) a tiny bit or particle, e.g. He hasn’t a grue of sense.
Similar words:
Latin: grus may mean a crane (bird) or a type of siege engine / war machine bearing similarity to the neck of a crane (bird).
Catalan: grua - same as French.
Esperanto: gruo also means crane (bird) or machine.
Swiss German (dialect): grüezi means "God greets you".
Romanian: grâu means wheat.
English: GRU is term for Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie).
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