It could change your life, rest assured. It's the 21st Century Cure!*
German class sucked today. We spent half an hour taking turns reading a few sentences from a short story which was part of Monday's homework. When the story was finished, we started again so that everyone got a chance to read. This is not how you practice spoken German, and this is not how you start a two-hour evening class.
Then we spent half an hour writing one of those multi-person stories some of us have done in elementary school. You know, I write one line, then you write one line, then our friend Bob writes one line, and before you know it we have a crazy story about a pirate and possessed pink sneakers saving the world from giant marshmallows. We weren't even practicing any particular grammar, and each person only wrote two sentences, and what was the point of this?!?
Then we spent a ridiculous amount of time practicing the art of "". No, I'm not kidding. We paired-up and repeated dialogue like:
Person A: The soup is cold.
Person B: Oh, it's our speciality!
Person A: Yes, okay, but the soup is still cold.
The tone goes down in the first sentence, while it goes up in the third. This is what we practiced. With given sentences.
I don't even, yo. I give up.
And then, we read our homework describing an advertisement, and the teacher posted the ones we'd chosen up on a wall, and when we were done and class was over and we were leaving, she crumpled them up and I'd wanted to get my advertisement back because it was really cool and the thing is I probably would have thrown it away in a few days, but the fact that she crumpled it, that I never got a chance to take it home in all its glossy glory (oh, I took it back, but it's crumpled and looks like it's been attacked by spiders drunk-weaving), and I should not be upset about this but I am because hormones and shit life and I just wanted to have control over one thing that was mine.
Okay, that was ranty. I don't know why it upset me so much - well, hormones - but it really upset me, in the English sense of "break down crying" upset.
About the hormones, can I just give a "fuck you" to people who think PMS is a social construct? I actually have had a friend who said this to my face, when I was telling her about my PMS depression-ish joys. If your friend is telling you how they break down sobbing the entire week before their period, how they can't do anything because of the mind-numbing oh noes, woe!, then you shut up about how you read that in other societies or other time periods no women had PMS and it's just me thinking, "Oh, I had a bad day. Hey, I'm going to have my period soon. That must be it!" when I just said, "I'd be crying for a week and not know why, until I started keeping track of the really bad and senseless days on a calendar for a year or so and noticed a pattern. Now, when I break down crying in public restrooms, I can pull myself back together a bit if and when I remember to do the math and think that it's not me being horrifically sad, it's my hormones."
Also? The USA National Library of Health's PMS entry on PMS and on PMDD Suck on that lollipop.
Sickle's Review of Repo! The Genetic Opera:
Sickle Wields the Science Stick: On icanhascheezburger, someone posts a video: Fennec Fox Demands Love. Cue the "OMGWTF that's a wild animal, why is it captivity!" voices and the "it's totally domesticated, no worries mate, have some fallacies" maddness, and I back away slowly to shake my head (and Science Stick!) far from the drama. My references are all going to be Wiki because I have neither the time nor patience to pull up relevant journals and I am not doing a literature review to shake the Science Stick over the concepts of domestication, tameness, and similar. Deal with it. This shit got long enough as it is.
The most offending comments, in the eyes of The Science:
Fennec foxes are domestic bred and have been for quite a while now. Though they still have wild brethren, a captive bred fox is not a wild animal. It’s like saying a domestic housecat is wild because you’ve met a particularly vicious stray.
- MeMyself&I
...these foxes have been bred as domestic pets. For at least a century. If you even tried to release this animal into the wild it would die.
- Jenjen
Let's break this down, shall we?
Fennec fozes are domestic bred and have been for quite a while now. - No.
Oh, wait, I should elaborate? Fine.
The species is classified a "Small wild/exotic canid" by the United States Department of Agriculture, along with the Coyote, Dingo, Jackal, and Arctic Fox [...] Although it cannot be considered domesticated, it can be kept in a domestic setting similar to dogs or cats.
- Wikipedia, Fennec Fox - as pets
At most the fennec fox population used for the pet trade can be considered a captive or semi-domesticated population. Also, there is no such thing as being "domestic bred".
Raised commercially (captive or semidomesticated): These populations are ranched or farmed in large numbers for food, commodities, or the pet trade, commonly breed in captivity, but as a group are not substantially altered in appearance or behavior from their wild cousins.
Wikipedia, taming - degrees
Though they still have wild brethren, a captive-bred fox is not a wild animal. - No. It's a captive-bred wild animal. This does not make it domesticated, nor even tame. Lions, for example, are captive-bred and exist in the wild, yet no individual lion is considered domesticated. Not even trained ones you see in films. Those are tamed. And even then, regardless of tamness, it's a wild animal. It's what it is, not how that individual has been reared or handled.
It’s like saying a domestic housecat is wild because you’ve met a particularly vicious stray. - But this is what you're saying. You're saying a fennec fox is domesticated because you've met a particularly well-tamed individual. It's still wild, just like the housecat is still domesticated. This is determined on a population level, not an individual level.
And you'd still be wrong in calling a housecat wild if it's a stray. A domestic housecat that is "particularly vicious" is feral.
A feral organism is one that has escaped from domestication and returned, partly or wholly, to a wild state.
Wikipedia, feral
And don't give me any crap about "wild state" meaning it's wild. In science, words actually have meaning. It isn't. It's feral. It's behaviourally wildlike.
...these foxes have been bred as domestic pets. For at least a century. - That they have been bred as pets does not make them domesticated. Cheetahs were bred as pets, and in fact some still are kept as pets, but cheetahs still aren't domesticated.
In fact, the very fact that they're exotic pets, or exotic animals gives the fact away that they're not domesticated.
Unlike cats and dogs, exotic animals have not been domesticated and remain wild. Even if they are bred for the pet trade and raised by humans, they may be unpredictable, largely untrainable, and in some cases, dangerous, especially as full-grown adults.
Wikipedia, exotic pets - domestication
What these are is tame.
Tameness implies a reduction in wildness^, where animals become more easily handled by humans. Some animals are easier to tame than others, and are amenable to domestication.
^ Wildness is literally the quality of being wild or untamed, but further to this, it has been defined as a quality produced in nature (Thoreau 1906), as that which emerges from a forest (Micoud 1993), and as a level of achievement in nature (Cookson 2004).
Wikipedia, wildness
A great difference exists between a tame animal and a domesticated animal. The term "domesticated" refers to an entire species or variety while the term "tame" can refer to just one individual within a species or variety. Humans have tamed many thousands of animals that have never been truly domesticated. [...] Dividing lines include whether a specimen born to wild parents would differ in appearance or behavior from one born to domesticated parents.
Wikipedia, taming - degrees
What would make them domesticated is selective breeding. This is, in fact, what domestication is.
Domestication (from Latin domesticus) or taming is the process whereby a population of animals or plants, through a process of selection, becomes accustomed to human provision and control. A defining characteristic of domestication is artificial selection by humans.
Wikipedia, domestication
To be considered domesticated, a population of animals must have their behavior, life cycle, or physiology systemically altered as a result of being under human control for many generations. Animals included in this list that do not fully meet this criterion are designated "captive-bred" or "semi-domesticated".
Wikipedia, List of domesticated animals
Now, if the breeding of fennec fox meant for the pet trade were selective - which seems unlikly considering breeders are using the hand-rearing method to obtain friendly foxes, rather than breeding friendlier foxes - then we'd be in business for the domestic label.
Consider the domesticated silver fox.
The domesticated silver fox (marketed as the Siberian fox) is a domesticated form of the silver morph of the red fox. As a result of selective breeding, the new foxes not only became tamer, but more dog-like as well.
The result of over 50 years of experiments in the Soviet Union and Russia, the breeding project was set up in 1959[1] by the Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev. It continues today at The Institute of Cytology and Genetics at Novosibirsk, under the supervision of Lyudmila Trut.
Wikipedia, domesticated silver fox
Notice how you don't need "at least a century" to get the domesticated label. It's the selective breeding and the changes that produces that makes it a domestic animal population.
This population of domestic silver foxes, for example, has the following traits:
Domesticated foxes exhibit both behavioral and physiological changes from their wild forebears. They are friendlier with humans, put their ears down (like dogs), wag their tails when happy, and vocalize and bark like domesticated dogs. As a consequence of breeding, they also developed color patterns like domesticated dogs and lost their distinctive musky 'fox smell'.
Wikipedia, domesticated silver fox - traits under domestication
Here, watch this ten minute documentary. It will explain everything (and will do so in both English and Russian accents handling adorable foxes, so there's even more win):
If you even tried to release this animal into the wild it would die. - *facepalm* That's because it's been captive-bred. Same thing would happen to a zoo-bred lion, and no one's saying it's domesticated. This is why Joy Adamson's successful release of captive-raised Elsa was such a breakthrough.
Let me leave you with two last things. One, the degrees of taming leading to domestication:
Then we spent half an hour writing one of those multi-person stories some of us have done in elementary school. You know, I write one line, then you write one line, then our friend Bob writes one line, and before you know it we have a crazy story about a pirate and possessed pink sneakers saving the world from giant marshmallows. We weren't even practicing any particular grammar, and each person only wrote two sentences, and what was the point of this?!?
Then we spent a ridiculous amount of time practicing the art of "". No, I'm not kidding. We paired-up and repeated dialogue like:
Person A: The soup is cold.
Person B: Oh, it's our speciality!
Person A: Yes, okay, but the soup is still cold.
The tone goes down in the first sentence, while it goes up in the third. This is what we practiced. With given sentences.
I don't even, yo. I give up.
And then, we read our homework describing an advertisement, and the teacher posted the ones we'd chosen up on a wall, and when we were done and class was over and we were leaving, she crumpled them up and I'd wanted to get my advertisement back because it was really cool and the thing is I probably would have thrown it away in a few days, but the fact that she crumpled it, that I never got a chance to take it home in all its glossy glory (oh, I took it back, but it's crumpled and looks like it's been attacked by spiders drunk-weaving), and I should not be upset about this but I am because hormones and shit life and I just wanted to have control over one thing that was mine.
Okay, that was ranty. I don't know why it upset me so much - well, hormones - but it really upset me, in the English sense of "break down crying" upset.
About the hormones, can I just give a "fuck you" to people who think PMS is a social construct? I actually have had a friend who said this to my face, when I was telling her about my PMS depression-ish joys. If your friend is telling you how they break down sobbing the entire week before their period, how they can't do anything because of the mind-numbing oh noes, woe!, then you shut up about how you read that in other societies or other time periods no women had PMS and it's just me thinking, "Oh, I had a bad day. Hey, I'm going to have my period soon. That must be it!" when I just said, "I'd be crying for a week and not know why, until I started keeping track of the really bad and senseless days on a calendar for a year or so and noticed a pattern. Now, when I break down crying in public restrooms, I can pull myself back together a bit if and when I remember to do the math and think that it's not me being horrifically sad, it's my hormones."
Also? The USA National Library of Health's PMS entry on PMS and on PMDD Suck on that lollipop.
Sickle's Review of Repo! The Genetic Opera:
- It is awesome. (Trailer) I remember the crazy mad hype on fandomsecrets months before the movie came out, and believe be, the hype is totally founded. (Unless cracky science fiction dramatic slasher opera isn't really your thing - like my brother - then you might not like it.) It's rocking fun, the story is good (and easy to follow in that characters are well-introduced and get back-stories) and the songs are brilliant
- Speaking of, Zydrate Anatomy is still the best song there, although I Didn't Know I'd Love You So Much is rapidly becoming my also-favorite.
- And speaking of Zydrate Anatomy, can I just say? Graverobber is made of unf.
- Anthony Stewart Head was spectacular. His singing - and yes, he does have an album out - his acting, everything. Oh man, I've missed seeing him. (This is why I need to watch Merlin, I know.) I didn't even have to choose between hopeing for him being Giles-like or him being Ripper-like. (And, um, Sexy Evil Voice is Sexy.)
- And again, speaking of Anthony Head, I didn't know his brother was Murray Head, of One Night in Bangkok. That is... Wow. That's a classic, that is.
Sickle Wields the Science Stick: On icanhascheezburger, someone posts a video: Fennec Fox Demands Love. Cue the "OMGWTF that's a wild animal, why is it captivity!" voices and the "it's totally domesticated, no worries mate, have some fallacies" maddness, and I back away slowly to shake my head (and Science Stick!) far from the drama. My references are all going to be Wiki because I have neither the time nor patience to pull up relevant journals and I am not doing a literature review to shake the Science Stick over the concepts of domestication, tameness, and similar. Deal with it. This shit got long enough as it is.
The most offending comments, in the eyes of The Science:
Fennec foxes are domestic bred and have been for quite a while now. Though they still have wild brethren, a captive bred fox is not a wild animal. It’s like saying a domestic housecat is wild because you’ve met a particularly vicious stray.
- MeMyself&I
...these foxes have been bred as domestic pets. For at least a century. If you even tried to release this animal into the wild it would die.
- Jenjen
Let's break this down, shall we?
Fennec fozes are domestic bred and have been for quite a while now. - No.
Oh, wait, I should elaborate? Fine.
The species is classified a "Small wild/exotic canid" by the United States Department of Agriculture, along with the Coyote, Dingo, Jackal, and Arctic Fox [...] Although it cannot be considered domesticated, it can be kept in a domestic setting similar to dogs or cats.
- Wikipedia, Fennec Fox - as pets
At most the fennec fox population used for the pet trade can be considered a captive or semi-domesticated population. Also, there is no such thing as being "domestic bred".
Raised commercially (captive or semidomesticated): These populations are ranched or farmed in large numbers for food, commodities, or the pet trade, commonly breed in captivity, but as a group are not substantially altered in appearance or behavior from their wild cousins.
Wikipedia, taming - degrees
Though they still have wild brethren, a captive-bred fox is not a wild animal. - No. It's a captive-bred wild animal. This does not make it domesticated, nor even tame. Lions, for example, are captive-bred and exist in the wild, yet no individual lion is considered domesticated. Not even trained ones you see in films. Those are tamed. And even then, regardless of tamness, it's a wild animal. It's what it is, not how that individual has been reared or handled.
It’s like saying a domestic housecat is wild because you’ve met a particularly vicious stray. - But this is what you're saying. You're saying a fennec fox is domesticated because you've met a particularly well-tamed individual. It's still wild, just like the housecat is still domesticated. This is determined on a population level, not an individual level.
And you'd still be wrong in calling a housecat wild if it's a stray. A domestic housecat that is "particularly vicious" is feral.
A feral organism is one that has escaped from domestication and returned, partly or wholly, to a wild state.
Wikipedia, feral
And don't give me any crap about "wild state" meaning it's wild. In science, words actually have meaning. It isn't. It's feral. It's behaviourally wildlike.
...these foxes have been bred as domestic pets. For at least a century. - That they have been bred as pets does not make them domesticated. Cheetahs were bred as pets, and in fact some still are kept as pets, but cheetahs still aren't domesticated.
In fact, the very fact that they're exotic pets, or exotic animals gives the fact away that they're not domesticated.
Unlike cats and dogs, exotic animals have not been domesticated and remain wild. Even if they are bred for the pet trade and raised by humans, they may be unpredictable, largely untrainable, and in some cases, dangerous, especially as full-grown adults.
Wikipedia, exotic pets - domestication
What these are is tame.
Tameness implies a reduction in wildness^, where animals become more easily handled by humans. Some animals are easier to tame than others, and are amenable to domestication.
^ Wildness is literally the quality of being wild or untamed, but further to this, it has been defined as a quality produced in nature (Thoreau 1906), as that which emerges from a forest (Micoud 1993), and as a level of achievement in nature (Cookson 2004).
Wikipedia, wildness
A great difference exists between a tame animal and a domesticated animal. The term "domesticated" refers to an entire species or variety while the term "tame" can refer to just one individual within a species or variety. Humans have tamed many thousands of animals that have never been truly domesticated. [...] Dividing lines include whether a specimen born to wild parents would differ in appearance or behavior from one born to domesticated parents.
Wikipedia, taming - degrees
What would make them domesticated is selective breeding. This is, in fact, what domestication is.
Domestication (from Latin domesticus) or taming is the process whereby a population of animals or plants, through a process of selection, becomes accustomed to human provision and control. A defining characteristic of domestication is artificial selection by humans.
Wikipedia, domestication
To be considered domesticated, a population of animals must have their behavior, life cycle, or physiology systemically altered as a result of being under human control for many generations. Animals included in this list that do not fully meet this criterion are designated "captive-bred" or "semi-domesticated".
Wikipedia, List of domesticated animals
Now, if the breeding of fennec fox meant for the pet trade were selective - which seems unlikly considering breeders are using the hand-rearing method to obtain friendly foxes, rather than breeding friendlier foxes - then we'd be in business for the domestic label.
Consider the domesticated silver fox.
The domesticated silver fox (marketed as the Siberian fox) is a domesticated form of the silver morph of the red fox. As a result of selective breeding, the new foxes not only became tamer, but more dog-like as well.
The result of over 50 years of experiments in the Soviet Union and Russia, the breeding project was set up in 1959[1] by the Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev. It continues today at The Institute of Cytology and Genetics at Novosibirsk, under the supervision of Lyudmila Trut.
Wikipedia, domesticated silver fox
Notice how you don't need "at least a century" to get the domesticated label. It's the selective breeding and the changes that produces that makes it a domestic animal population.
This population of domestic silver foxes, for example, has the following traits:
Domesticated foxes exhibit both behavioral and physiological changes from their wild forebears. They are friendlier with humans, put their ears down (like dogs), wag their tails when happy, and vocalize and bark like domesticated dogs. As a consequence of breeding, they also developed color patterns like domesticated dogs and lost their distinctive musky 'fox smell'.
Wikipedia, domesticated silver fox - traits under domestication
Here, watch this ten minute documentary. It will explain everything (and will do so in both English and Russian accents handling adorable foxes, so there's even more win):
Click to viewIf you even tried to release this animal into the wild it would die. - *facepalm* That's because it's been captive-bred. Same thing would happen to a zoo-bred lion, and no one's saying it's domesticated. This is why Joy Adamson's successful release of captive-raised Elsa was such a breakthrough.
Let me leave you with two last things. One, the degrees of taming leading to domestication:
- Wild: These species experience their full life cycles without deliberate human intervention.
- Raised at zoos or botanical gardens (captive): These species are nurtured and sometimes bred under human control, but remain as a group essentially indistinguishable in appearance or behaviour from their wild counterparts. (Zoos and botanical gardens sometimes exhibit domesticated or feral animals and plants such as camels, mustangs, and some orchids.)
- Raised commercially (captive or semidomesticated): These species are ranched or farmed in large numbers for food, commodities, or the pet trade, but as a group they are not substantially altered in appearance or behavior. Examples include the elephant, ostrich, deer, alligator, cricket, pearl oyster, and ball python. (These species are sometimes referred to as partially domesticated.)
- Domesticated: These species or varieties are bred and raised under human control for many generations and are substantially altered as a group in appearance or behaviour. Examples include the Canary, Pigeons, the Budgerigar, the peach-faced Lovebird, dogs, cats, sheep, cattle, chickens, llamas, guinea pigs and laboratory mice.
Wikipedia, taming - degrees
And two, a List of domesticated animals
See why I couldn't let myself comment on the thread?
Science Stick out.
Videos of the Day: "Intervention", Margaret Cho ft. Tegen & Sara
xxxThePeachxxx's Halle Berry, Blackness Confirmed
I can't count how many times people keep bringing up the issue of ethnicity. A little lesson on why Halle Berry should be less concerned with the ethnicity of her near-white-looking daughter and should focus more on not looking like an ignorant dumbass. The "one-drop rule" is bullshit.
"Time and Place", Last Dinosaurs - seschat, I thought of you five seconds into the music video ;)
Meme: Good Things:
Day 19: I went for a walk, had ice-cream (coffee flavour of the gods and ricotta & blue berries of those other gods), and checked out the new Little Big Town toy store. Grabby hands were made at many things, because I am twelve. Or six, depending on the toy. (I *insert sarcasm* love how their gallery is really just headshot of Important People in the shop, as opposed to, oh, I don't know, their products?)
Day 20: ...I'm going to watch Castle The Secret Diary of a Call Girl tonight even if my alarm clock kills me tomorrow. Yays. Granted, it's officially Day 21 now (Approprite Icon is Appropriate), so Day 20 had... Rasberries with cream. Yes. That was the highlight.
Links of the Day:
Supernatural:
breebree16's Fic Devour (2014!Castiel/Jo)
rec_hymenated's Fic Recommendations: Gen/Friendship/Pre-Slash - Dean/Castiel
Nimloth87's Fanart Castiel's Secret Techniques - *sporfle* D'awww.
secretlytodream's Fanvid Last Song
pluginzeta's Heroes Crossover Fanmix The Blood and the Life Eternal (Sylar/Castiel) - Oh hai new OTP!
_queequag's Icons
e0wyn's Icons
SupernaturalWiki's Sex Degrees of Jensen Ackles
FanPop's Castiel Macros
Doctor Who:
thenoblethang's Fanvid Heart, We Will Forget Him
Other Fandom:
rex_dart's Inception Cosplay Ginception - Awesomesauce.
Random:
theweaselking's The black and white squares are perfectly straight and parallel. - But your brain says differently. "Also, this was made in Lego."
naamah_darling's Thing I Made Thursday #5, Deceased Fairy Gaff, #2, Inked Coyote Skull
marika_kailaya's Sleep well but when you die I'll say it serves you right - On what is happening in Libya
CNN's Quake rattles New Zealand
Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap's Episode 24: At that price it better have chunks of Paula Deen in it!
Tokyobling's Shark Crocodile Art
How to be a Retronaut's Ikea Stonehenge
The Art of Darkness' Tutorial Mummified Fairy
Lee Moyer's Art Gallery
Wondermarks' True Stuff: 1939 Beard Photo-Spread; Haselden cartoons
ThroughTheSandGlass' Grain-by-Grain (2): the amazing sand bottles of Andrew Clemens - 0.0
ClipClop's Andrew Clemens Picture Gallery
Kate D. MacDowell's Portfolio - Eeeeeee! ♥
Laurel Roth's Art Man's Best Friend - These designer pet skulls illustrate man’s hand in the design and creation of his environment and its inhabitants. [...] Each carving is realistic in form but hand carved from solid industrial polysulfone or acrylic block and polished to a clear, high gloss resembling crystal, ice sculpture, or amber.
Watever's A Boy's Own Genre, or Not - A response to the "Science Fiction is by boys and for boys and now girls are ruining it for anyone with testicles, except the gays, who are just like girls anyway (and whose testicles frighten me)" mentality.
Luxirare's Yogurt Parfaits with Fruit Caviar - Awesomesauceballs!
Pflanze42's Spherification: Step-by-step instructions - How to make fake caviar, like the fruit caviar.
HauntForum's Tutorial Mandrake Root
HalloweenMosnterList's The Monsterlist of Halloween Projects
PaintingAbout's List of Reference Photograph Sources for Artists
Wetcanvas' Reference Library of Photographs
* Repo! The Genetic Opera