So my boy Jet has suffered from feline herpes since he was born, and the vet recommended he have red meat for the lysine in it at least once a week. I found some freeze dried goat meat treats online, and I was looking up if it has any of the good stuff in it for him when I learned that lysine can help with the treatment of HUMAN herpes as well!! TIL!
Today I learned that the reason I've been so hot lately is because SNRI's and certain high dose anti-psych medications can actually raise your body temp and cause you to be more likely to get heat stroke
Lithium'll do that too. When I was in the hospital once I remember outside time in the heat meant any patients on lithium were closely monitored in case they were getting too hot
I already knew sea turtles have spiky mouths and that they were used to prevent their food escaping, but this article explains they also keep the food down when the turtles push out the water they swallow while eating. Neat!
TIL that in 2002 the US military staged a massive war game to "test" their shiny new buzzwordy computer-based tactics, where one side (Blue) played the totally-not-United-States and had all the cool gadgets, and the other side (Red) were definitely not supposed to be any unnamed Middle Eastern country that might perhaps contain valuable petroleum reserves, and didn't get all the fancy surveillance and communication systems. It was supposed to last 2 weeks. Instead, Red crushed Blue inside of 24 hours by going radio silent, using the time Blue had given them to surrender to scout Blue's position, and then launching a bajillion missiles at them. The people up the chain responded to this valuable test data by... saying that didn't count, and telling them to do it again, but this time with both sides following a script to make sure Blue won. Tax dollars in action.
The US crushed the opposing force in days and then proceeded to fail at occupation. The Millennium Challenge is... a pet peeve of mine. It comes up all the time, but... short version is that it's nonsense, the contest blithely ignored the difficulties Red would face in implementing this strategy, and its predictions dramatically failed to manifest. First of all, it modeled a conventional attack against an amphibious landing, not an insurgency, which is where the US actually ran into trouble. In this regard its predictions utterly failed to manifest. Total US losses in Iraq and Afghanistan combined are half of Blue's simulated losses. So, how did it happen? Millennium Challenge was primarily intended as a training exercise in electronic intelligence and countermeasures. Van Riper, representing REDFOR, did not like this idea, believing that such network-centric warfare was worthless. He also had fairly broad authority to determine the parameters of the simulation, and in an attempt to make his point... choose some parameters that might be called 'generous'. Or absurd. The expected course of action for REDFOR was to engage with shore-based anti-ship batteries and attack aircraft. Which of course produce signals that can be tracked. Van Riper was having none of that, so he changed the parameters. This is, to be clear, entirely simulated: There were actual US military personnel and material representing (some portion of) BLUFOR, but REDFOR didn't actually exist. It was entirely on paper and simulator screens. In any event, he had his notional anti-ship missiles moved to notional civilian fishing boats (nevermind that said missiles were often larger than the boats they were supposedly mounted on, for starters), and used 'motorcycle couriers' to send messages instead of radio (of course, said motorcycle couriers, given they did not actually exist, were not bound by such problems as 'having to travel between locations', and made a vague shrug in the direction of 'ground signals, I dunno' to coordinate aircraft. So armed, these REDFOR then blended in with (also mostly notional) civilian traffic to approach within a precise distance of BLUFOR and launch a massive, perfectly coordinated attack, to devastating effect, followed by waves of suicidal attacks to inflict further damage. I don't think I need to tell you the chances of launching a massive, perfectly coordinated attack using motorcycle couriers to communicate between boats (that are 99% missile by volume). Fortunately for REDFOR, they were basically playing with Show Map on. It would have been a minor annoyance, except... At this point, the staff in charge of the exercise said 'okay, nice shot, you made your point. Now given that the whole point of this training exercise is to train, let's try that again. Maybe with less nonsense.' Van Riper was not pleased with this entirely obvious decision, probably because he was opposed to this entire exercise. He had declared Shipwrecks Fall, You Die, and was determined to make it stand. And proceeded to be uncooperative for the remainder of the project, forcing the higher exercise staff to constantly countermand... further Good Ideas. 'No, you can't actually put a Scud on a pickup truck' or 'No, you can't hide an airstrip in the middle of the desert' kind of ideas. Hence, 'scripting'. The ultimate result, of course, was to make the whole exercise pretty much worthless except as a bit of finger wagging for a certain type of Military Guy - except that, as mentioned at the very top, it doesn't actually work for them either, because as it turns out, Iraq didn't have amphibious, FTL motorcycles or speedboat mounted ASMs or... etc, etc, etc. The trap that befell the US military in Iraq was not in a single, massive ambush sinking a carrier battle group, it was a systematic failure of morals and vision, the lack of any particular assessment of the difficulties of conducting an occupation, of a system so paralyzed by greed and dogma it was unable to achieve anything other than a haphazard corporate looting and vague gestures towards they'll-welcome-us-as-liberators once the initial invasion was over. In the end, Van Riper was not only wrong about the solution, he was wrong about the problem. Network Centric Warfare was not the US's downfall in the middle east. Haliburton was. ... sorry for exploding on you. Like I said, pet peeve.
About the existence of guarana, which appears to be SCP-066 in fruit form. Spoiler: scary eyeball fruit
Oh that looks interesting as FUCK, I know what I’m watching later! Thanks for pinging me, language shit is Always Wild. Speaking of wild language shit, TIL the origin of the word “guys” (and the phrase “you guys”)!
Today I learned that there are actually two completely different games called Metal Gear 2. For mysterious reasons, Konami developed a game called Snake's Revenge exclusively for the Western market... and then wouldn't publish the canon sequel (Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake) outside Japan in case it cut into Snake's Revenge sales. Despite Metal Gear Solid being a direct sequel to Solid Snake, MG2:SS didn't make it out of Japan until 15 years, 3 console generations, and 3 games after its release, when the first two games in the series came as an extra on the disc of a special edition of Metal Gear Solid 3. Western players who were familiar with the older games going into Metal Gear Solid back when it first came out must have had an even weirder experience than anyone else playing Metal Gear Solid.
if you're on a laptop or w/e and press the windows key and the . key, it opens up a little window that lets you to type out emoji you can also type out kaomoji (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ and ⁜special※ characters! ♪ (relatedly, if you have japanese input turned on, you can type in "hoshi" to get ★stars☆ and "haato" for ♡hearts♥) e: rip, I added some emoji in here as demonstration but they don't show up after posting ):
