Depends on how the song is interpreted. The intention is probably “by the 𝑛ᵗʰ day of Christmas, my true love had given to me [list of 𝑛+(𝑛–1)+…1 items]” but the actual grammar means that by day 12, you’d have received 𝑛(13–𝑛) of the 𝑛ᵗʰ item, or
12 drummers drumming
22 pipers piping
30 lords-a leaping
36 ladies dancing
40 maids a-milking
42 swans a-swimming
42 geese a-laying
40 gold rings
36 calling birds
30 French hens
22 turtle doves
12 partriges in pear trees
Total is 184 birds. By day 7, only 69 birds, up 50 % from 46 by day 6. At least the number of received birds stays constant (23) on days 8-12. The geese technically-a-reproducing are not accounted for, as the eggs might not be fertilized and take several weeks to hatch.
One of my cats (who is very sweet but a tad mentally handicapped) likes to try to get into people’s food while they’re eating it. Especially my toddler’s, who is an easy target. Poultry and sliced turkey are her most popular choices. She had a bit of a rough life before we wound up with her, and has a mild food insecurity (when it suits her) and what seems like a streak of ferality despite her love for affection.
Anyway, whenever I catch her sneaking a piece of food off a plate, I go, “GET OUTTA HERE, YA FUCKIN’ RAT!”, and she runs off, sometimes with a piece of food, then stops to devour it and/or furiously lick her feet and play it off cool. It’s annoying, but she’s loved, and I guess at the end of the day the vibe just wouldn’t be right it she wasn’t a fuckin’ rat every now and then.
It’s the sodium that will get her one of these days. But ya live like a rat, ya fuckin’ die like a rat.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Every asshole you ever knew is there. Every corrupt politician stealing food from the needy is there. Every child molester, every rapist you ever read about. Every war criminal ever identified is right fucking there.
Honestly, all the good stuff is too, but damn… maybe we should just do the universe a favor before all those fuckwits escape and pollute the cosmos.
I just hope we’re not seeing the start of a shutdown of the North Atlantic current, which is likely what led to the Younger Dryas ice age, which marked a dramatic climate shift and widespread extinction event over just a couple of decades:
The change was relatively sudden, took place over decades, and resulted in a decline of temperatures in Greenland by 4–10 °C (7.2–18 °F), and advances of glaciers and drier conditions over much of the temperate Northern Hemisphere. A number of theories have been put forward about the cause, and the hypothesis historically most supported by scientists is that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which transports warm water from the Equator towards the North Pole, was interrupted by an influx of fresh, cold water from North America into the Atlantic.
The thing I keep thinking about, and I feel like I’ve never been able to properly communicate, is that the machines our society runs on are built to run in a certain temperature range.
The 2021 texas winter fiasco was a perfect demonstration of what happens when we try to run a society’s machinery outside of it’s expected temperature range. Yes, the ERCOT goofballs were trying to save money by narrowing that expected operating range because “It never gets that cold” and “It never gets that hot”, but my badly articulated point still stands - a system was made to operate in a temperature range outside of it’s capability, and it started to fail. They were minutes away from losing very expensive and hard to replace equipment. What we don’t want is for one of the more competently-run power grids in the world to start to buckle due to temperatures, because the same thing that happened in texas could happen on a larger scale.
And that’s just talking about the power grid. Anything with a heat exchanger in it, including your car and air conditioner and all the refrigeration that is needed to keep everyone fed, is designed to run in a certain temperature range, and will stop working if you run it outside of that range for too long.
But wait, we can just design stuff to run in a wider temperature range! We certainly can. But we would have to redesign everything that moves heat around.
The day after tomorrow was related, but relied on a no longer mainstream idea that the Arctic vortex could become a whole northern hemisphere storm, so big it would liquify nitrogen in its central low
We really hope that’s not a thing that can happen. It would render most of the northern hemisphere dead
When you stop and actually think about our situation you realise how thin our operating margins are, we are at the mercy of whatever the planet does and our safety is subject to immediate dismissal should the conditions change. Worse of course are the random cosmic whims which could wipe us out instantly at any time e.g. comets, the sun going weird, etc.
It’s a thought that gives me comfort that we, as a species, will be evicted before we can do irreparable damage so that life can continue to evolve without us.
Is there any resource for forecasting what will likely occur in a given area? I don’t see how we can stop climate change now, so I want to prepare my family for it.
Yeah, but the changes to weather patterns will vary from location to location, right?
This is what I mean:
Warming is already occurring in all areas of the globe, but models of future temperatures show that the changes will not be distributed equally. Polar regions and land areas are expected to see the largest temperature changes.
Right, but if that current shuts down, that means the transfer of warm and cold currents that power weather patterns across the entire northern hemisphere will be disrupted.
The last time that happened, the entire northern hemisphere basically froze over. If you live north of the equator, whether it’s North America, Europe, or Asia, the result would be similar: no more warm seasons and freezing to the point of glaciation, from what I understand. I’m not a climatologist, though.
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