Red Dragon Inn

Agnostic atheist, ignostic apatheist, nontheist, secular humanist, methodological naturalist, irreligious
Progressive, left-leaning centrist
Biologist, educator

[Red Dragon Inn @RedDragonInn13]

It should be easy to consistently oppose fascism and tyranny...

Free Iran from the Ayatollah
Free Palestine from Hamas
Support Ukraine against Putin's invasion
Support Greenland against Trump's threats

Stop being biased and making excuses for authoritarian extremism

[Red Dragon Inn @RedDragonInn13]

I seem to have not been on Twitter since the beginning of November, I was logged out on my laptop and forgot my password... I had to charge an old phone to get on since it was still signed in.

I hope everybody has been well these padt couple months.

[Red Dragon Inn @RedDragonInn13]

@paulogia0 I bet 90% of people who write about alien abductions also believe in alien abductions...

So the beliefs of the writers don't really tell us anything about reality, only what those writers believe

[Red Dragon Inn @RedDragonInn13]

@ChrisRGun 10 Halo 3
9 ODST and Reach
8 Halo 2 and Halo 1
7 Halo 5, Halo Wars 1
6 Halo Wars 2, Halo 4, and Infinite

[Tomos Doran 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 🇵🇸 @portraitinflesh]

Good news, obviously. But wouldn't it be nice if, one of these days, we had an election in the developed world that *wasn't* a nailbiter between "normal, nice things" and "burn everything to the ground"? Crazy talk, I know.

[Richard V. Reeves @RichardvReeves]

Men applying for teaching jobs in England are systematically rated lower than women with identical qualifications. Only 24% of teachers are men. 14% in primary schools. We're closing doors to male role models at the moment children need them most, argues @CPRMenBoys: https://t.co/vGdgeAT1cN

[Red Dragon Inn @RedDragonInn13]

The comments of this remind me of a time that I ended with an 89.98% and since school policy was to round to 2 decimal places it means I had a B. If the policy had been to round to 1 decimal place I would have had a 90.0% A.

The B wasn't soul crushing, and next semester improved

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

These Harvard students…did not react well to the report on grade inflation:

“The whole entire day, I was crying. I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best. It just felt soul-crushing.”

“What makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars. Now we have to throw that all away and pursue just academics. I believe that attacks the very notion of what Harvard is.”

“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it’s so harshly graded. If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”

[Red Dragon Inn @RedDragonInn13]

@Lptomov82 @sfmcguire79 The term "grade inflation" refers to the concept of giving students grades they do not earn (at many schools this is done for athletes so they can continue playing football).

So it is a process of artificially inflating grades in order to make the student and school look better.

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

The idea that Democrats can dispense with persuading heterodox swing voters -- by moving left to mobilize its progressive base -- rests on nothing but bad intuitions, per @simon_bazelon's report https://t.co/PV1ELJkam5

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Charles Murray claims in a WSJ essay that reports of "terminal lucidity" (brain-dead patients briefly coming back to life for a final goodbye) proves the existence of a ghost in the machine. Oh, please. Jerry Coyne @evolutionistrue (quoting a lengthy response from me) shows why this "soul of the gaps" argument is bogus. https://t.co/tnYnHaw0Fu. @michaelshermer will weigh in soon.

[Armin Navabi @ArminNavabi]

Hamas isn’t fighting for a Palestinian state; it’s fighting for global Islamic rule.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Michael Shermer @michaelshermer debunks the claims that near-death experiences and terminal lucidity are evidence for a soul, aka a ghost in the machine. https://t.co/m25Cda5OkI

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Nobel Peace Prize winner and Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado:

“I say to the American people: Do not be seduced. Socialism is the sexiest path to losing your freedom. Guard your freedom jealously. Defend it fiercely. Because freedom is not just an American promise—it is the hope of the world.”

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journal. Now it’s one of many accused of favouring authors because of their identity group rather than the excellence and importance of their science.
https://t.co/qrjUooumnW

[Justin Amash @justinamash]

Because the quality to be celebrated in a member of Congress is to “shut up and vote the way he’s told” by a separate branch of government.

If ever there were an apt use of the phrase “weak men create hard times,” it’s a congressman who kneels to the man he ought to be checking.

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

In 1066 AD, William the Conqueror's victory at the Battle of Hastings brought a new French-speaking ruling class to England. This created a curious linguistic divide that we can still see on our dinner plates today....

The Norman lords who were served the meals used French-derived words for the cooked meat on their tables. They ate 'boeuf' (beef), 'porc' (pork), and 'mouton' (mutton).

Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon peasants who raised the animals continued to use their Old English terms for the live creatures. They tended to the 'cu' (cow), the 'picg' (pig), and the 'sceap' (sheep).

Over time, this class-based language seeped into modern English. The words of the wealthy nobles became the standard for the food, while the words of the farmers remained for the animals.
While this changed the language, studies suggest it didn't drastically alter the diet of the common person, though pork did grow in popularity after the conquest.

The separation of animal and meat names is a direct and lasting legacy of a single historical event.

#archaeohistories

[Red Dragon Inn @RedDragonInn13]

@razibkhan From what I recall there is also a geographical cline in England itself... northeast has more Norse influence, southeast more contintental (Angle/Saxon/Jute/Dane/Norman/etc...), and the southwest in Cornwall is closer to the ancient Brythonic Welsh ancestry

[Alex Strudwick Young @AlexTISYoung]

New high quality Denisovan genome unearths evidence for 'super archaic' admixture into Denisovans and at least three distinct sources of Denisovan ancestry in modern humans.

[Red Dragon Inn @RedDragonInn13]

@Halalcoholism They completely miss the point of '80s/'90s counter culture...

The message was that it didn't matter how you look or what way you dress, but rather who you are on the inside. An effeminate gay man like Boy George was still just as much a man regardless of what he wore.

[Tatsuya Yamashita @Tatsuya9JP]

Yes, Oceanians and EastAsians/Önge etc. share a recent common ancestor to the exclusion of West Eurasians: the East Eurasian Core (EEC) branch of the IUP wave. E.g. their primary ancestor used the same route to reach East Asia and Oceania. – f3 for Tianyuan_40k (basal EEC):