Me: Oh Yeah, If You Think School Photography Is Hard Now, Try Imagining Doing This With Film.

Mine also peed everywhere? Just be aware of that because I very much was not and after handling my rats I very much often smelled like pee. Not sure if it's a male rat thing but I searched it up and rats apparently can't control their bladder so they just continuously leak pee...

Some things I wish I knew when first getting a rat:

You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on a cage. Rat owners get so pissy over getting name brand fancy cages that can survive 12 world wars when you can actually just stack some cheap larger rabbit/guinea pig/ferret cages. I put a $60 dollar cage on top of my fancy ass $200 ferret one and my rats love it. No injuries or spontaneous exploding into smithereens like rat owners think will happen. I line the sides with cloth and it helps a lot.

If you're American, Oxbow is your friend. I used them with my rabbits years ago when I had them and they're great.

DIY decorations are fun but it gets exhausting after a while. If you want to play it safe, just using hides, hammocks and chew toys work!

All natural cages are cool if it's like an aesthetic thing but in reality they rot, get stinky and gross very fast. Very nasty and smelly.

Rats DO NOT like chew toys for cats or dogs. They love paper, wood, cloth, sticks, pumice, etc.

A rat injuring another rat is not by default always aggression. Only time I've seen it happen is either 1) They're sick/in pain, super grumpy and you need to get them to the vet or 2) You're still bonding them and someone got angry because they're still strangers. Best to rule it out both before neutering or seeking other options for aggression.

“It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it? The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society. This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.”

—

What if we talked about monolingual White children the way we talk about low-income children of color?

Excerpt from a satirical blog post from The Educational Linguist that makes a good point about which language skills we value as a society and the problems with talking about a “language gap”. 

(via lingrix)

May I humbly request to joy yer crew as a lowly ship rat my good sire I can offer my excellent services of crumb recycling and strange and slightly vexing mystery noises at night

I'm starting a pirate crew

This is actually really cool! This seems like actually one of the cool things that AI can help with. In comparison, last thing I heard about coding enzymes, they were reliant on gamers and puzzle thinkers to play a video game where they were the ones to try and figure out the best amino code that'll make a working protein (god bless those gamers and thinkers)

AI technology generates original proteins from scratch

Scientists have created an AI system capable of generating artificial enzymes from scratch.

In laboratory tests, some of these enzymes worked as well as those found in nature, even when their artificially generated amino acid sequences diverged significantly from any known natural protein.

The experiment demonstrates that natural language processing, although it was developed to read and write language text, can learn at least some of the underlying principles of biology. Salesforce Research developed the AI program, called ProGen, which uses next-token prediction to assemble amino acid sequences into artificial proteins.

Scientists said the new technology could become more powerful than directed evolution, the Nobel-prize winning protein design technology, and it will energize the 50-year-old field of protein engineering by speeding the development of new proteins that can be used for almost anything from therapeutics to degrading plastic.

“The artificial designs perform much better than designs that were inspired by the evolutionary process,” said James Fraser, Ph.D., professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the UCSF School of Pharmacy, and an author of the work, which was published Jan. 26, in Nature Biotechnology. A previous version of the paper has been available on the preprint server BiorXiv since July of 2021, where it garnered several dozen citations before being published in a peer-reviewed journal.

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I wanna kiss you in places you’re insecure about

Sure I could try the shoelaces thing, or I could just advertise I'm on tumblr on my water bottle.

Boston creampie donut

deep dish chicago pussy

“May I?” “You may.”

Pick what happens:

You walk into a bar after your long day at work herding cats across the great concrete plains of New Wark.

After 3 long hours of downing marmalade milk, you decide you need to head to the washroom to make room for more.

You walk down the corridor that the washroom sign points to, only to find it split into two tunnels.

One of them smells like your dad's old college duffelbag that he kept his spoon collection in, and the other one smells like Kraft Mac n cheese with a hint of oyster sauce.

this is a message from the future, it will make sense later.

just a few hours left until the blue haired people run the earth btw