Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Miss Cellania's Links

 35 Movies and TV Shows That Chucked Their Historical Source Material in a Woodchipper. However, only the first 15 or so have to do with historical dramas in which basic facts were changed for the film. Of the next 20, almost all are small anachronistic details that most people would never catch (much less recall) in both fictional and non-fictional movies.   

Cats Are Perfect. An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why. (via Strange Company)

The world’s first true female car crash dummy is here — and it’s a big deal. (via Real Clear Science)

LEGO Star Wars Does Halloween with Three New Shorts.

Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day has a sweet story to go with it. (via Fark)

The Oat-Milk Cocktail That Took Down an Army. (via Nag on the Lake)

Big House Comes with Big Surprises. Lots of fun, if you have a few million to purchase it.

The Medieval Sect That Inspired the Video Game Assassin’s Creed

A Blast from the Past (2015): The Spellbinding Stories of 6 Historic Witches. 

No image today because Google can't take yes for an answer. I don't know how long that will last.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The average woman is 5'3" and 137 lbs? That doesn't sound plausible. Long overdue, either way.

xoxoxoBruce said...

Let me get this straight, other critters are imperfect because they have changed to adapt to the environment they live in, but cats are perfect because they can’t/won’t/don’t. Methinks she has that ass backwards

Yeah, 5'3" and 137 lbs went out with the 1950's.

I think one of the biggest surprises of the Big House is the cost of maintaining it. I think a minimum crew of 6. Maybe a few more for the outbuildings.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, it would be more precise to say cats have evolved to a local maximum. That does mean they can't change significantly, because any short-term change would be a downwards step; if there is some significantly better cat-like evolutionary design out there, earth cats could never attain it.

One thing which does change over time, even for cats, is tooth size: prey get tougher hides; predators get bigger teeth. This is a cyclic arms race which has repeated more than once. The end result is sabre-toothed tigers and herd animals with hides so thick their mobility is affected. Then both sides go extinct and we go back to smaller-toothed predators hunting thinner-skinned prey, at which point the arms race starts up again.