It doesn’t matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON’T CHASE YOU.

I used to live in Florida on the edge of a big lake where my landlord had carved out a lagoon that mama gators used to hatch their broods, so there would often be between 50 and 100 little alligators chilling out in my backyard sunning themselves. For fun I would try to sneak up on one of them and poke it on the head just to watch it and all the others scatter into the lagoon. Everybody I told about this thought I was absolutely batshit crazy, but I knew that at the time there had been something like 5 alligator attacks on humans in Florida since the 1940s, always on little children playing in water (I was obviously a little child mentally but physically I was a 200-pound adult man). So I knew I wasn’t risking life or limb doing this. For the record, my sneaking up technique was to stand stock still and only move a step or two towards the gator whenever the wind blew; it seems that the gators just took me for a swaying branch and ignored me.

What made me stop doing this was one day I happened to look down at what I thought was a big log and realized that it was actually the mama gator, about 12’ long from tip to tail and probably 2’ in diameter at her midsection. I was fairly confident that she wouldn’t attack me on land either - but not that confident.

Yay! Finally a Youtuber in this thread that I’ve actually heard of and watched.

Whatever doesn’t kill you sends you to the ER.

6 cans of Coke (Sam’s cola ftw) a day

Damn, that is 960 calories a day of soda. If you’re an average-sized man, that represents 40% of your daily diet (around 2500 cal per day).

it’s made from fucking grass!

I started making my own sourdough bread during COVID because for a while there they didn’t have bread or yeast at the grocery stores. I love the fact that the ingredients are just flour, water, salt and starter (which itself is just flour and water and the yeastie beasties). The yeast all dies during cooking and the water is essentially cooked out of it, so sourdough bread is really just flour altered into a really funky form with a bit of salt. I like the added thought that even the flour is just ground-up grass.

AIRBORNE ICEBERGS

Bring back Habakkuk!

I love when owners show off how “practical” that truck bed is - when it has about the same carrying capacity as my roadster’s trunk.

I saw my first cybertruck in person the other day. It looks incredibly dumb in promotional photos, but it’s astonishing how much stupider it looks in traffic surrounded by normal vehicles.

This shows the phenomenon pretty well. I like to watch this once in a while to remind myself that I know nothing about anything.

I actually met Benoit Mandelbrot when I was an intern at IBM’s T. J. Watson research center in the late '80s. I was randomly walking around the building and passed by a tiny office with “B. Mandelbrot” on the door. I stuck my head in, saw an old bald dude sitting there and said “are you the Bernard Mandelbrot?” He said “yes” and I said “oh” and walked on. Apparently he didn’t hear that I said “Bernard” instead of “Benoit”.

For a while in the programming world “why are manhole covers round?” was a common question to be asked in interviews. I had no fucking clue the first time I was asked, but subsequently I would put on my deep pondering face and reason through it out loud and arrive at the correct answer, which never failed to impress the interviewer. After a few years I started owning up to the fact that I (and everyone else) had already heard that question.

They even have the “whale” concept where they charge more for graphs and pictures and even more for *gasp* colored versions of same.

This is random but my graduate school program had an annual cookout event called the Armadillo Roast which featured an actual barbecued armadillo (along with more conventional meats). I tried some and it tasted like sweeter dark meat chicken. Then I learned that that particular armadillo had been found as roadkill and that armadillos can carry leprosy and that it can possibly be transmitted by eating it. These facts did not improve my mood that day.

Jane Goodall made an interesting observation about the chimpanzees she studied: she found that nearly 50% of the fatalities she observed were due to infants falling to the ground as the mothers they were clinging to moved through the trees. This was one of the bases of C Owen Lovejoy’s interesting (and largely unknown today in popular Paleoanthropology) theory that bipedality in the human lineage evolved primarily because it greatly reduced this source of mortality.

I had a squirrel once fall out of a tree and land right in front of me with a nice loud thump. He was stunned for a couple of seconds and then staggered slowly back over to the tree trunk and climbed back up it. Really changed my perspective on squirrels.

Phillip. Of course, we knew him better by the name his eventually ex-wife gave him on Facebook: “Ol’ Three Inches Two Minutes”.

I had a meeting years ago with my company’s CTO about my salary. He kicked off the meeting by saying “you care a lot more about what you make than I do” which prompted me to ask for 50% more than I had been planning to ask for. He agreed to it without argument. TBF he was a coke addict married to the daughter of the company’s owner and within six months he’d been divorced and fired, but I got to keep my salary.

I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word “infinity”. Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you’re a Bombast customer, you’re helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.

Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.