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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • And wealthy or well-connected. If you’re poor, you don’t necessarily have much of a chance.

    The link is a long read, but interesting. The story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 for supposedly setting a fire that killed his three kids.

    In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”


  • They have been for a while now. It started before the API thing with subreddits that were basically mirrors of English ones. But (badly) auto translated into German.

    A few weeks ago, the Google results got flooded with auto translations. You can still find stuff that was written in German, but you have to limit the search to German subs (site:reddit.com/r/de, for example).

    Or check the sub name in the search results. If it’s in German, you should be good. If it’s in English, or if it doesn’t show up at all, it’s usually a machine translation.


  • Some kids have died at camps like this. The link is the story of a 16 year old who died in Arizona in 1994.

    He had to hike for miles a day and sleep with no blanket or sleeping bag in temperatures below freezing. He had no food for 11 days out of 20, partly as a punishment for being sick.

    He complained about being sick for weeks - stomach pain, falling down, hallucinations. On the day he died, it took him an hour to crawl 20 feet to the fire. He died from an infection from a perforated ulcer. The staff were standing around making fun of him when he collapsed for the last time.

    The owners of the camp pleaded guilty to negligent homicide. One of the counselors was convicted of felony neglect.

    Earlier this year, a 12 year old suffocated to death at a wilderness camp in North Carolina. His death was found to be a homicide.



  • That’s what I thought too, but bones are about 1/3 protein with a lot of fat and minerals. Kind of like tonkotsu broth.

    They also store well. If the vultures find more than they need, they’ll keep the extra bones in a storage place really high up. The fat content drops a lot when the bones dry out, but the protein is still there.

    The downside is bones don’t have a lot of water, so bearded vultures need a source of fresh water in their territory.




  • Maybe it depends on what you watch. I use Youtube for music (only things that I search for) and sometimes live streams of an owl nest or something like that.

    If I stick to that, the recommendations are sort of OK. Usually stuff I watched before. Little to no clickbait or random topics.

    I clicked on one reaction video to a song I listened to just to see what would happen. The recommendations turned into like 90% reaction videos, plus a bunch of topics I’ve never shown any interest in. U.S. politics, the death penalty in Japan, gaming, Brexit, some Christian hymns, and brand new videos on random topics.







  • Gender often comes along with cases, which basically show you what role a noun is playing in a sentence. For example, is someone doing something, or is something being done to them. That lets you change the word order and keep the same meaning. You can emphasize different parts of the sentence, or just be more flexible with how you say things.

    Here’s an example from German:

    • Der Hund (subject) hat den Mann (object) gebissen. / The dog bit the man.
    • Den Mann (object) hat der Hund (subject) gebissen. / The dog bit the man. (Implied: That guy, and not someone else.)

    In English, the meaning changes when you change the word order.

    • The dog bit the man.
    • The man bit the dog.

    Languages do fine with genders and without. They’re just different systems that happened to evolve over time. And languages can even change. English used to have 3 genders, but they disappeared hundreds of years ago. Instead of having like 12 different ways to say “the,” we just have one, thanks to the Vikings and the Norman invaders.



  • The ones that interest you the most will be easiest to stick with. I find things just through my general interests and poking around.

    Favorite music genre? Listen to bands from different countries and see how they sound. TV shows, movies, and documentaries from other countries are another big one. Listen to the original language, see if it sounds interesting, maybe read a little about it.

    Or maybe you know someone who you’d like to be able to talk with in their language. It could be anything. Pick one or two things to try and you’ll get a feel for what you like.