It's odd that 2020 is almost over and I've not seen one person the whole year go viral for using astrology to predict how shit a year it would be this time last year.

Not one post from november or december last year going "the stars say pandemic, lockdown, unemployment, your parents will die." Etc
It's been a whole year. One person would have gone viral for having a post this time last december saying their astrologer predicted basically *any* part of this year
At the same time: remember the sheer joy of thinking he was dying? Billions of people eagerly urging that to materialize? Wishing all the negative energy you could possibly want on one man?

Kinda disproves that whole thing, huh.
2020: the year woo failed, entirely.

Not even preppers got out of it. They were the first people to start proudly coughing in each other's mouths to own the libs upon their fantasized biological disaster finally occurring.
It's been an unusual year, full of things that'd really, really have been quite easy to see if you could see the future.

You saw a tall dark stranger, but not the fact he hasn't left his house in 9 months?
You saw job opportunities, but not the fact that office has been closed for 9 months?

Academic success, but not that the school's been via zoom?
Like: it'd be pretty easy to tell the big things that changed if you were able to see the little things.
2020 has, if anything, finally driven a stake into people who think they can predict the future.
What's interesting is that it won't. The utter failure of predictions to come true, strengthens belief in predictions.

I *can* predict people will have an increased fervor for divination, of all sorts, next year, even though literally none of it worked for this year
Boomers were using bastardized gematria and numerology to predict the future based on typos in tweets. Look at how the utter failure of those predictions affected their belief
It's just hard to look at 2020 and not want to slap the shit out of people who predicted everything *but* 1 out of 1,000 Black americans dying of a disease that was deliberately mishandled.
Like: you'd think that'd be hard to miss. Whether in the stars, or the spirits, or whatever.

Pretty hard to pull a Shaun of the Dead and go "oh damn, I forgot to look to the left. Yup, there's the catastrophically mishandled pandemic that killed 1 out of 1,000 Black americans"
"I wonder how I missed that. Oh well. You want to know whether you'll have some romantic success next year?"
It *angers* me to see people act like their failure to predict 1 out of 1,000 Black americans dying in less than a year from a deliberately mishandled disease, is an inconsequential oopsie. A wee little oversight. Something they just didn't notice in the stars.
"oopsie woopsie, guess I missed a lil bit of genocide!"
It angers me in the same way mediums do, who claim that violent deaths cause restless spirits that knock over stuff.

And then never explain why Auschwitz is not a howling inhospitable vortex of levitating cars and boulders
If your divination can't predict genocide, or just plain ignores it, you've got some fucking thinking to do.

More from Anosognosiogenesis

So I've mentioned the sharpie test and the tueller drill.

Another reason you are dead within 1.5 seconds of encountering your first fast zombie, is adrenaline.


Most people who get attacked with a knife and survive to talk about it, say they never even knew a knife was there.

Or that they'd been stabbed, until after the fact.

In many cases, they think they'd just been punched, and are completely surprised

One reason the adage is "the winner is the one who dies in the ambulance, not the gutter," is because it's entirely possible to receive a fatal wound, not realize it, and then inflict a fatal wound on the other guy without *him* realizing it.

A dozen times within 30 seconds.

The marker drill teaches how you *will* get cut, fatally, without realizing it.

In full adrenaline freakout, this is even more pronounced.
The US immigration act of 1907 signed by Teddy Roosevelt: ableist as hell. https://t.co/ficeXOImo5


One theory for why the Spanish flu was so unusually lethal for young people:

They hadn't lived through the previous flu pandemic of 1889-1890 (https://t.co/OiDZYtdbWx) that killed about 1 million people. And thus had no carryover immunity.

It's suspected that the 1889 pandemic was not influenza, but a coronavirus.

The 1889 virus spread rapidly, killing mostly the elderly.

The 1889 virus was the first truly modern pandemic: people knew about germs, it spread via trains, it spread at the speed of modern transportation and commerce
An interesting thing about carp is that they can go into anoxic hibernation and switch to an anaerobic metabolism based on converting glycogen to ethanol.

The waste ethanol is diffused out the gills

https://t.co/V3D1umHf04

Carp can switch over to an anaerobic metabolism and quietly exhale booze until the situation gets better.

They basically evolved the same metabolic pathway as yeast, independently.

In theory, if you spent a few thousand years breeding carp for it, you could use them to make booze.

They'd be enormous, almost entirely glycogen deposits with a fish added as an afterthought.

The really interesting thing about anaerobic carp, is that they can go 4-5 months without oxygen by relying on liver glycogen.

You, a human, have only about 100 grams of glycogen in your liver, about 400 more grams in your skeletal muscles. Call it 500 grams total.

In humans, glycogen is also burned for energy. This is where the marathon runner's bonk comes from: you only have about 2,000 calories worth, and running a marathon burns those 2,000 calories.

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I wish this existed when I learned to code! Congrats on $250!!
I think a plausible explanation is that whatever Corbyn says or does, his critics will denounce - no matter how much hypocrisy it necessitates.


Corbyn opposes the exploitation of foreign sweatshop-workers - Labour MPs complain he's like Nigel

He speaks up in defence of migrants - Labour MPs whinge that he's not listening to the public's very real concerns about immigration:

He's wrong to prioritise Labour Party members over the public:

He's wrong to prioritise the public over Labour Party