Phillip Schaeffer

Always learning #science #arts #music

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@ThatEricAlper That’s easy…The Beatles!

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@DavidPSamson I’m so sorry 💔

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@VinnysCorner1 Billy Joe Dupree

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@HawkEmDownChris Babe Lafenberg

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@kevinnbrown Hi Kevin. Why are the Orioles blacked out tonight? I can’t get an explanation anywhere.

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@CheetoSquirrel1 I’m so sorry. 😞

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@shanrocksnwa I’m so sorry 😞

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@jdharm My wife and I came out to see you! Got to talk to you a little bit. You and everybody else from the staff were wonderful! Thank you!

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@editti22 All 3

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@BBGreatMoments I thought it was a bad idea, but it has worked pretty well. At that velocity and spin it’s really hard to call balls and strikes. Funny how the players are wrong a lot.

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@OriolesMagic23 Sadly, I agree. The starting pitching being the most disappointing. After Spring training they looked like they could be a top tier rotation. The defense is really weak. Hit every 4th game. Gonna be hard to compete that way. But, it’s early and I’m still hopeful. Let’s go O’s!

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@S_U_Network That’s a tough one.

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@vurnt22 Here here !

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Orcas eat great white sharks. They hunt seals, dolphins, and baby whales. They have never killed a single human in the open ocean. Not once, in all of recorded history.

An orca's brain weighs up to 15 pounds. Yours weighs about 3. They have roughly double the brain cells we do in the regions that handle complex thought. A neuroscientist at Emory named Lori Marino put an orca brain in an MRI and found these animals can tell different species apart underwater. They do it by sending out clicks that bounce off everything around them and come back as a kind of 3D sound map (this is called echolocation). From 500 feet away, an orca knows you're a human and not a seal. It skips you on purpose.

The answer is culture. Orcas around the world are divided into at least 10 separate populations, each with its own food rules, its own language, and its own way of hunting. All of it learned from their mothers. One population eats only fish. Another eats only marine mammals like seals and sea lions. These two populations can live in the exact same water and never swap a single meal. A baby orca learns what food is from its mother, and that list stays the same for life.

In the Pacific Northwest, one population called the Southern Residents eats almost nothing but Chinook salmon. Scientists have documented them killing harbor porpoises 78 times over six decades, carrying the dead porpoises in their mouths, and never once eating them. Even when the group was starving. A 2023 study in Marine Mammal Science looked at all 78 cases and concluded it was play. These orcas would rather go hungry than eat something their culture says isn't food.

Researchers studying whale behavior in 2001 found that orca cultural traditions "appear to have no parallel outside humans." Each family group has its own dialect, its own version of the language. Calves spend about two years just learning how to make all the sounds their family uses. Mothers will slow down a hunt on purpose so their young can watch.

In 2005, a 12-year-old kid was swimming in Helm Bay, Alaska when an orca came at him full speed. At the very last second, the orca seemed to realize it was charging a human. It bent its entire body in half and turned back to open water. In captivity, it goes differently. SeaWorld's Tilikum killed three people during his life in a concrete tank. Research from 2016, published in the journal Animals, traced it to psychological collapse from being locked away from the family bonds orcas need to stay stable.

I think calling this a "mystery" undersells the science. Orcas decide what to eat based on culture, not instinct. No orca mother has ever taught her calf to hunt humans, so no orca hunts humans. Only about 75 of those salmon-eating Southern Residents are still alive. Their pregnancy failure rate is 69% because we've destroyed their salmon runs. They won't break their food culture to survive. Whether we care enough to protect theirs is the part that actually matters.

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@Mike_kim714 Good luck!

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@realbenmcdonald @BritishOrioles @Orioles Let’s Play Ball! ⚾️ @Orioles

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@nats_sportschat Baltimore Orioles
95 wins

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@mooformoore5 I’ll go for all of them, but #4 seems a very good possibility.

[Phillip Schaeffer @PhilSchaeffer]

@Focal75_ Orioles are gonna surprise you.

[Metal Mark 🇺🇸 @MarkMantis]

Gawd. I hate to be “that guy” AGAIN but I seem to have angered the algorithm gods. Crazy, it seems to be mainly my political posts that fall flattest - the stuff that needs to get out there!

Can you plz drop a 💙 and repost if you see this? Cheers 🤘