When India accidentally wiped out its vultures, half a million people died in five years.
The bird doing zoomies in this video runs the most extreme digestive system in the animal kingdom. Vulture stomach acid sits near pH 1, strong enough to destroy anthrax, rabies, and botulism in the carcasses they eat. A flock strips a cow to bone in about 45 minutes.
India had 50 million of them. Free sanitation at national scale, in a country where religious custom means most cattle die natural deaths and every dead cow becomes a carcass someone has to deal with.
Then the patent on diclofenac expired in 1994. Farmers started using the cheap painkiller on livestock. Trace amounts left in a carcass cause kidney failure in vultures. Within a decade, 50 million birds fell to a few thousand. The fastest collapse of any bird species since the passenger pigeon.
The carcasses didn't disappear. Feral dogs took the vultures' place and brought rabies with them. Rotting remains leached into waterways. In districts where vultures once thrived, human death rates rose more than 4 percent. Economists at Chicago and Warwick put the toll at 100,000 extra deaths a year and $69 billion in annual damages.
So yes, the goofy bird sprinting down the walkway is adorable. It's also a disease firewall that evolution spent millions of years building and one generic painkiller nearly erased in ten.
Some segments from media have mentioned sporadic use of violence/detentions at Jantar Mantar by Delhi Police.
It is informed that no such incident has taken place and protest is being handled professionally. All are requested not to fall pray to any rumour/ misgivings, and, to assist Delhi Police in maintaining peace and public order at and around the site.
@RandstadIndia Dear @RandstadIndia,
A Form 16 is a statutory document, not a luxury.
It's been nearly two weeks since my first request. The only progress has been my email being forwarded from one team to another. No ownership. No resolution. Just "at the earliest convenience."
@Randstad
If you ever wondered how inefficient an HR support process can be, try requesting a Form 16 from @RandstadIndia Nearly two weeks, countless follow-ups, multiple escalations, zero accountability, and no document
The only thing moving faster than my request is the forwarding chain.
Dharmendra Pradhan won’t resign because accountability is contagious. If he goes, Hardeep Singh Puri is next. Then Ashwini Vaishnaw. Then Nirmala Sitharaman. Pull one domino and the entire chain of manufactured invincibility comes crashing down.
The math on this image is insane.
New Horizons transmitted at 2,000 bits per second from 3 billion miles away. Slower than a 1990s dial-up modem. It took 16 months to download all the flyby data.
The spacecraft had to hit a target box 100km wide, arriving within 150 seconds of schedule, after 9 years of flight. Miss it and the preloaded observation commands point at empty space.
Ten days before arrival, the spacecraft crashed and went into safe mode. Engineers had 72 hours to restore everything.
The probe is now 5 billion miles out, still whispering data back to Earth. We got 50 gigabits of Pluto photos using technology slower than your phone’s bluetooth.
Dear recruiters,
If you are looking for someone with :
Java, Python, PHP;
React, Angular, Next.js;
PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB;
AWS (S3, EC2, ECS, EKS);
Unix system administration;
Git & CI with TDD;
Docker & Kubernetes
you’re not hiring a Full Stack Developer.
You’re hiring an entire IT department.