This meteorite was revered as a sacred object by the indigenous peoples who surrounded its original landing spot and rituals such as dipping arrowheads in the rain-filled cavities was common to help bring success in hunting or battle. Then some white guy showed up and and came into possession of it by simply buying the land it stood on, which then made the meteorite legally his to do what he wanted with, so he sold it to the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. For many years, the native groups that used to revere the meteorite fought in court to get it back to its original resting place. Eventually, they reached an agreement with the AMNH to formally sign over ownership if they ever decide to take it off display. They also host private after-hours visits each year for the local native peoples. Personally, though, I feel that the museum now simply has more motivation to never ever take it off display. I'd be surprised if it comes back any time in the next 100 years, unfortunately.

The only two extant monotremes in the whole world have similar anatomies? Shocking! You could make this same meme substituting any other monotreme characteristic, really.

This chart really makes no sense at all. How does Lord of the Flies lie at the intersection of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451?

One’s about an ultra-conservative theocracy, one’s about government surveillance and propaganda, and one’s about destroying books because people’s attention spans have reduced past the ability to read and they’re too long/confusing/depressing. I guess authoritarianism might lie at the heart of all these? Meanwhile, though, Lord of the Flies is more about the dangers of unchecked groupthink and how it can lead to violence and cruelty.

Historically, boats had rudders (or “steer boards”) along the side of the ship instead of in the middle like we’d see them today. It was always on the right side of the boat, so to avoid smashing your rudder into the dock, you’d dock your ship on the other side. That means it was always the left side that literally faced the port, while starboard faced out into open water to protect that side from damage.

A real classic! What wasn’t featured in the original news story was a passerby who had demolitions experience in the army in Vietnam. He approached the guy in charge of the job and explained that this would never work because when you detonate explosives in sand like they were going to, instead of blowing the whale entirely out to sea laterally, the blast would create a cone of explosive force straight upward and shear off massive chucks of whale hundreds of feet into the air, while leaving half the carcass basically untouched. Here’s a 25 year anniversary retrospective with some extra bits of fun info.

I don’t understand why they didn’t come at high tide and tow it miles out to sea using a couple tugboats. No dismemberment necessary, just a big strap around the tail-fin. Once miles from shore, the whale could be lanced to release the decomposition gasses and allow it to sink naturally where it could benefit the sea floor for decades. If they’d gone maybe 50ish miles offshore, that would have been proper deep sea abyssal zone and perfect for a whalefall.

You don’t think it could have been street politics even though Tupac was very much involved with street politics? What legitimate reason is there for the FBI to kill Tupac in the first place? He was a little subversive, but nothing crazy. Why would they simply shoot Tupac in front of so many witnesses? You’d think that the FBI would be capable of a little more subtlety.

Good thing we won’t have to worry about that

I’m sorry this is so long, but I’ve put a lot of thought into this matter over the years, so I implore you to consider this decision very carefully before actually doing it.

Good homeschooling isn’t impossible, but my main issue with homeschooling is that many, perhaps most parents are either incapable or unwilling to put in the huge amount of effort that would be required to rival or surpass a typical public school education. I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack, it just seems like a lot of parents thinking about homeschooling don’t realize just how difficult it would actually be to do well. They bite off more than they can chew and the only one who really suffers for it is the kid. Your options for a decent home education are basically total personal dedication, treating it like an unpaid 60 hour a week job, or being wealthy enough that you can pay for private tutoring to free your time up. Otherwise, it would be a very difficult undertaking. The following questions are mostly rhetorical, just some things to think about:

Are you able to spend the time to do it right? 6-7 hours of actual hands-on instruction, 5 days a week? That much time would of course require a stay-at-home parent, something many or most families can’t afford to do. In addition, will you still have time to be able to homeschool as well as run necessary non-schooling errands in the same day? Things like grocery shopping, going to the doctor, cooking lunch/dinner, doing things after school, etc. This 6-7 hours also does not count towards any time you’ll have to spend outside of lessons, such as reviewing teaching materials, reviewing your child’s study materials, designing overall course curriculums, designing a daily lesson plan for each subject, physically setting up lessons/experiments, creating assignments/tests, grading assignments/tests, taking your kid to do extracurriculars, etc., so it’s more like 10-12+ hours per day. And if you were planning on just downloading all that stuff online or pulling it right out of a homeschooling book, that’s perhaps not even as good as what those unmotivated teachers you complain about would’ve done (which are actually pretty few and far between, in my experience). One of the best advantages of homeschooling is that it can be catered to your kid individually, but over-reliance on premade materials can have many parents delivering a cookie-cutter experience regardless.

Schools also have plenty of specialized staff because they know it would be impossible for one teacher to do everything by themselves in an effective way. What’s your plan to ensure you can cover each topic as well as a group of people who largely specializes in teaching that subject? Do you actually know the material well enough to teach it in the first place? Many parents simply aren’t informed enough on a given topic to teach a whole unit on the subject, and you might have to try to answer some pretty advanced questions.

Is this what your kid actually wants in the first place, or is it what you want for your kid? You seem to be under the impression that your kid would choose homeschool over public, but is that really true? Sure, it’s anecdotal, but everyone I’ve known who’s been homeschooled says that it was a net negative experience for them and that they’d have been much better off just staying in public school. They missed seeing their friends everyday, they felt they hadn’t learned as much as their peers and struggled in college, they felt their parents had dropped the ball in general. At the same time, it would have saved their parents a lot of time, money, and prevented an unfavorable result. That saved time, energy, and money could then in turn benefit the child by providing better rested parents who have the time and resources to go out and do fun things with them. It’s definitely still possible to have a great relationship with your kid even if they’re in public school, and they may benefit from the space it affords.

What is your plan to ensure adequate socialization of your child? I’ve known several homeschooled kids and they were all noticeably a bit socially stunted. I’d hope in addition to all the schooling you do, you can frequently still find time to take them to the park, enroll them in a sport or club of some kind, and otherwise provide many opportunities for them to make new friends/hang out with old ones.

Overall, homeschooling isn’t inherently bad, but I haven’t personally ever seen it done well. Providing a place full of love and support for your child is commendable, but I don’t know if the love of a parent alone is automatically a good replacement for a thorough education by a whole team of instructors alongside their peers. You admit that homeschooling has a bad reputation “because you only hear about shitty experiences,” but this seems like a good opportunity to quote another one of your comments, “So close…” I’m not saying good homeschooling doesn’t exist, but if we only hear about bad experiences, perhaps that should lend credit to how hard it is to do well and how many fail despite trying.

Very nice. Now let’s see how rich it’s made you, OP.

The best part of this meme is that Brexit had literally nothing to do with it whatsoever, the guy just decided to expand his markets to other places, which he could have done either way, and well might have. He expanded his international enterprise across a wider part of the world, and you mean to tell me he started making more money? That’s pretty amazing! Why isn’t everyone doing this?

Just yesterday I was searching for photos in Brave. Right from the outset without clicking on anything, there was a huge, unclosable banner taking up a third of the screen that was an ad for Etsy or something. I tried to go to settings to change it to how it was before, but I was confronted with another ad in the settings:

“Want ad-free search results? Upgrade to Search Premium™ today!”

Time to finally make that switch to Firefox, I guess.

Border Patrol has a long history of destroying water stores left out for migrants. It’s usually plastic jugs that they slash open and leave behind to be found by the migrants, which is almost worse to find than just taking the water and USBP knows that.

At least some of these names have to be knockoffs of actual athletes, right? For example, he’s no “Sleve McDichael”, but Steve McMichael was a player for the Greenbay Packers football team when this game came out.