FYI, that ?is= parameter at the end of the URL exists exclusively to track you and the people who click it – namely it’s a unique share ID that points site visits back to you.

For example, Alice shares a video with Bob with ?is=1234. Bob follows the URL with that unique ID, telling YouTube that he got there thanks to Alice.

And can they forward it onto Chuck Tingle so he can write her biography?

Ah, yes, much like Todd Rogers conducted an investigation into his mathematically impossible high score and stated it was due to “the human element” and not “cheating”.

The fact that the oldest known living species that hasn’t changed in millions of years and still exist is some type of crab.

Actually, it’s not, not even close. You’re thinking of the horseshoe crab (family Limulidae, the lumulids), which are chelicerates – vastly more closely related to arachnids like spiders and scorpions.

To put this into perspective phylogenetically, if you look at true crabs and the Anomura, you have to “zoom out” on the tree of life to include shrimp, then to include woodlice, then to include barnacles, then to include bees, then to include centipedes, then to include trilobites, etc. until you hit a common ancestor with the chelicerates.

If you’re talking about morphology, they’re also extremely different, only superficially resembling crabs. For example, limulids outright fail one of the main criteria for carcinization, namely in the morphology of its opisthoma (abdomen; for context if you’re curious to look up the criteria, this’ll be the “pleon” in crabs). If you look at the ventral sides of limulids and crabs, you’ll see they’re very different.

This is why it never shows up in any serious discussion of carcinization; it’s straight-up not even close to what’s being discussed. “Crab body plan” has a fairly specific meaning, not just “eh, fuck it, marine arthropod with a shell and about 10 legs looks close enough”.

Moreover, from an evolutionary perspective, the fact that limulids are successful long-term doesn’t mean anything about the evolutionary trajectory of anything else. If anything, even if that argument made sense, then it’d surely be “return to limulid”.

Side note: if you wanted to argue that extremely old, long-successful body plans correlate with modern evolutionary trajectories, then outshining horseshoe crabs by a few dozen million years are velvet worms (phylum Onychophora), which have been found in the early Cambrian. You can see how similar they look.

(Good further reading for this is Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind (2012) by Richard Fortey. It’s a solid read.)

Just to be clear, this meme about carcinization has gone too far in the public consciousness, even accounting for irony. The only extant examples of carcinization are in the sister infraorder (Anomura) of the true crabs (Brachyura).

It’s still a remarkable phenomenon (and as someone who reads a lot about king crabs, you should look into it!), but the meme has gone waaaaay too far. It’d be like if New World monkeys (parvorder Platyrrhini) tended to evolve toward an Old World monkey-like body plan (parvorder Catarrhini), and the conclusion drawn was “well surely on a long enough time scale, everything returns to Old World monke.”

Edit: I forgot to mention that there was a good study about this last this year in case anyone wants to brave the jargon.

OP, you have the wrong link.

✨ Stall tactics ✨

You of all people talking about other people enjoying their echo chamber is goddamn hilarious given the one you moderate.

With a commandment stating “though shalt not kill” you’d think partitioning good kills from bad kills would be a non-starter

Brother, have you picked up and read a Bible? Like even just Exodus?

Edit: I forgot that the fall of Jericho is the Book of Joshua, not Exodus, although timeline-wise, in the grand scheme of things, it’s still basically right after the Commandments, which was what I was getting at.

Joshua and the Promised Land fucking up my perception of how the Bible flows narratively.

“fraid I can’t dollarydoo that, Dave.”

“I’m just sayin’ it’s possible, ya daft cunt!”

In a movie where the antagonist tries and fails to hunt down and kill a flightless bird? I could see it.

(It’s 30 minutes.)

Truly.

Not to be confused with Xanthoidea, the superfamily of crabs. (Genuinely did think for a minute that the comic strip was talking about some superfamily, given the “oidea” suffix.)

Hint: Check the clock in the background in panels 2 and 3.

Mardering a child? A Bradley, even?

If you cannot agree with the majority of official historians about what really happened in the past, you are not informed enough to decide the future.

Hilarious, because the “majority of historians” would tell you what happens when you institute tests as a requirement to vote. (See also)

“Surely the leopards would never eat my face!” says person with juicy, delectable face.

I want it peer reviewed and standardized, and maybe even overseen by an international ethics board. That dispenses with a lot of the other problems.

Ah, yes, sure.

Like an Ouroboros of irony that you reference low intelligence linked to authoritarian tendencies and then use that to justify an authoritarian measure you’re too unintelligent to understand the consequences of in order to gatekeep the unintelligent authoritarians.

And maybe just link a study you want to discuss instead of a screenshot of an LLM summary you asked it to vomit out for you.

Edit: Ironically, were this stupid shit ever implemented (fuck no is a competent democracy doing this), you’d probably end up with a death penalty situation, where competent historians, ethicists, etc. refuse to participate, just like competent medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies refuse to participate in the death penalty.

More than 116 others remain missing after the incident, which, according to survivors, happened near Guhere, north of the fishing town of Obock, during the night of 8-9 October when the boat was travelling from Djibouti to Yemen.

Oh, so the “at least” is doing some heavy lifting. God damn.