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[Egan_BW]

Heh, yes, I am excluding "extinction of all macroscopic life on earth", there.
But to me, that sounds like something that would be excessively difficult for a human to pull off.
I mean, the universe could collapse tomorrow, but that doesn't have much to do with us, does it?

[Yoink]

I read an article a while ago about meat allergy. I think it was specifically to cowflesh, but I could be misremembering

[JoshuaFH]

I read an article a while ago about meat allergy. I think it was specifically to cowflesh, but I could be misremembering

It may have been about the tick bites that cause a meat allergy:

https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bugbitten/2014/04/28/mammalian-meat-allergy-caused-by-tick-bites/

[Frumple]

Heh, yes, I am excluding "extinction of all macroscopic life on earth", there.
But to me, that sounds like something that would be excessively difficult for a human to pull off.
I mean, the universe could collapse tomorrow, but that doesn't have much to do with us, does it?

A human, sure, but in general we're already courting stuff like atmospheric methane poisoning and acidified oceans deep sixing the biosphere, among who knows what else. It's not easy to wreck our capability as a species to progress and/or rebuild vis a vis our technological base, but it's easier than anyone would like. The march of technology is far from inevitable, unfortunately. There's plenty of Bad Ends littering the path

[Rolan7]

I read an article a while ago about meat allergy. I think it was specifically to cowflesh, but I could be misremembering

It may have been about the tick bites that cause a meat allergy:

https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bugbitten/2014/04/28/mammalian-meat-allergy-caused-by-tick-bites/

Oh!  I actually know someone with that!  He can eat poultry just fine but no mammals, and it came from a deer tick.  Seemed so... odd (he's an old hippy-type), but thanks for the article confirming it.

[Egan_BW]

Heh, yes, I am excluding "extinction of all macroscopic life on earth", there.
But to me, that sounds like something that would be excessively difficult for a human to pull off.
I mean, the universe could collapse tomorrow, but that doesn't have much to do with us, does it?

A human, sure, but in general we're already courting stuff like atmospheric methane poisoning and acidified oceans deep sixing the biosphere, among who knows what else. It's not easy to wreck our capability as a species to progress and/or rebuild vis a vis our technological base, but it's easier than anyone would like. The march of technology is far from inevitable, unfortunately. There's plenty of Bad Ends littering the path

Life might just be a bit hardier than you think. It might not be fun, but we could probably survive whatever acid apocalipse we care to put ourselves though. We iz tha biggust an' tha strongest!

[TheBiggerFish]

This isn't a WTF as much as a followup to earlier, but there's someone who prepares food from liposuction'd fat.

What is actually WTFing me is WTF IS THIS DORM SWELTERINGLY HOT.

[Frumple]

Life might just be a bit hardier than you think. It might not be fun, but we could probably survive whatever acid apocalipse we care to put ourselves though. We iz tha biggust an' tha strongest!

... no, no, those are things with a pretty good chance of wiping us and most other macroorganisms out. Like, we're talking stuff that was actually more or less what caused one of the previous mass extinctions -- the worst one, t'boot, that did kill off a majority of complex animal life on earth... and the bigger stuff tended to have worst luck than the rest of it. Took longer to recover from that mess than we've been able to date hominids back to, never mind anything particularly human. And we've got signs we're helping along another round of it. And that's ignoring the other stuff, ahaha.

Bacteria are hardy. Plants lean toward pretty hard to wreck on the net, too. Humans (and most things large enough to see, really) have a fairly small range of environments that won't kill them. We're pretty damn good but our situation is legitimately still bloody precarious, at the moment. We still have a ways to go before something less than some sort of galaxy-scale supernova won't kill us.

Don't really have to kill us entirely, though. Just do enough to erode the tech base to the point there's no recovering. Iirc there's good odds if we don't make it this time, we've already exploited the world hard enough redeveloping from the start may not even be possible, at the least not fast enough we'd survive another big hit.

[Skynet]

A few days ago, I saw a blog post with a very reasonable blog topic ("case studies"), along with a very reasonable comment thread. Very pleasant thread, much more enjoyable than most comment threads. However, the comments all were odd. They were appearing to be like high-school essays about a topic, and never really interacted with each other, only just lecturing and meandering on the topic. I quickly concluded that the blogger and the commenters were all robots (or human spammers...hard to tell really) that were only generating spam content to make the blog seem more active.

Today, I saw this type of blog post again...reasonable topic, reasonable commenters, but only token interaction between the commenters. Further research shows that the blogger/commenters are actually human and commenting on the blog was actually part of a a school assignment. So I was fairly relived by that. But...you never know what may happen next...

EDIT: I'm not angry by the robo-blog because it produced content that was enjoyable to read and better than most human-generated content. On the other hand, I'm not happy that the robot-blog exist, because if one of these blogs exists...more can come. The blog comments were from ~2012, so it's possible that spammers have long since abandoned the practice.

EDIT2: And just to be clear, I think the robo-blog's comments have been plagiarized from real high school papers. And since I hate plagiarism, that's another reason not to be happy by this blog.

[Rolan7]

Your username is quite apt.
Interesting story!  I hope you share a link maybe?

Also:
Sometimes my friends and I check out the state flags of these great United States of America.
They're so bad

Even Best Carolina is... alright.  Arguably this is the one thing which South Carolina bests us at.

But... just... almost all the flags are just so terrible.
Alabama is the Scotland of the US.  WHY

Also, New Mexico used this beautiful peace of art for over a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_New_Mexico_(1912-1925).svg

[Skynet]

Interesting story!  I hope you share a link maybe?

Knew I forgot something.

First Suspicious Blog Post (topic was "Case Studies")

Second Suspicious Blog Post (topic was "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" and "Funes, the Memorious")

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Alabama#Current_flag The article says its a St. Andrew cross.

[Rolan7]

And so is Scotland's.
And in both cases it's literally just an X-cross.

But why did Alabama use an X-cross as a flag?  And why did they officially dedicate it to a Catholic saint??

[Neonivek]

I am surprised that after the Civil war they didn't try to force all the southern states to change their flags

Ok I shouldn't actually bring up this here...

[hector13]

What's wrong with the Scottish flag?