Kinda psyched for all-masked showings of DUNE, very immersive
Anyone unmasks, point at them and go "THEY SQUANDER THE WATER OF THE SIETCH" and challenge 'em to a crysknife duel
— Max Gladstone (@maxgladstone) July 28, 2021
The movie I’m looking forward to is The Green Knight, but not until I can watch it at home. Any of you braver Jackals seen it yet?
Sportsball-adjacent:
Obama joins NBA Africa as strategic partner https://t.co/PCK16LbumQ pic.twitter.com/CZnUSPOSUY
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 28, 2021
Former U.S. President Barack Obama has joined NBA Africa as a strategic partner to help advance social responsibility efforts across the continent, the National Basketball Association said on Tuesday.
Obama will have a minority equity stake in the new venture, which over time he intends to use to fund Obama Foundation youth and leadership programs across Africa.
“By investing in communities, promoting gender equality, and cultivating the love of the game of basketball, I believe that NBA Africa can make a difference for so many of Africa’s young people,” Obama said in a news release…
And from the faunasphere…
Seems like a decent metaphor for community formation on Twitter https://t.co/u4ZaeZrwm5
— The Mall Krampus (@cakotz) July 29, 2021
… [Bird ecologist Richard] Major has been studying Australian birds for almost 40 years. A few years back, he began noticing something peculiar in Sydney: cockatoos that were eating out of someone’s open trash bin.
“I wasn’t really expecting cockatoos to be rubbish bin feeders,” he said. “They’re not something like ibis or crows that are scavengers. These are good, self-respecting seed-eaters — or at least plant-eaters.”…
“The thing that really got me was when I saw a cockatoo fly up from a rubbish bin, sit on a electricity wire, holding a chicken drumstick in its foot,” he says, explaining that a cockatoo can perch on one leg and hold its food in another. “Here it was, just munching on a drumstick, and I thought, ‘Oh god, this is verging on cannibalism.’ Certainly once cockatoos start eating meat, we’re done for.”
He’d just assumed that those bins were already open and overflowing — nothing clever about that. But Major later began observing several of the birds actually opening the bins themselves, and now he was intrigued. If this behavior spreads, he thought, “There’ll be cockatoos opening bins all over the place and they’ll have this endless supply of rubbish.” A cockatoo smorgasbord…
A team of scientists — including John Martin, Sonja Wild, Jana K. Hörsch and Lucy Aplin — joined Klump and Major to figure out what was going on with these clever cockatoos. They started by sending surveys out to different suburbs in Sydney to ask people if they had noticed the big white parrots opening up their trash bins and, if they had, when they first saw it. The survey results showed that over two years, the number of trash-raiding cockatoo sightings had increased from just three suburbs to 44, indicating that the birds were learning from each other. A culture of trash can break-ins was radiating out from the birds who first figured it out…
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