Ravens are equally close relatives, as are parrots.

Doesn’t make him not ace.

The aye-aye is also doing much better, mostly because the population size was severely underestimated at the time of writing.

And yeah, the book is amazing. I usually describe it to fans of his other works as somehow being his weirdest book, despite being non-fiction.

I had to use one of those hex wrenches to fix my shower a few months back. It definitely felt like vindication.

Weird comic, why put the punchline in the penultimate panel?

To be fair, based on the (lack of) spelling and grammar in his e-mails, that might actually be how he writes letters.

I myself only ever visit chewbac.ca!

It wouldn’t. A tetrahedron has four sides, hence the name, while an Egyptian-style pyramid has five (if you include the base, otherwise it isn’t even a polyhedron).

No, I agree that independence is necessary, not just because of “always”, but because if, as a crude example, your odds of hitting B halve each time you hit A, an infinite number of tries isn’t guaranteed to give you Shakespeare, even if the odds aren’t technically 0. My problem was that what you originally described wasn’t independence, it’s uniformity, which isn’t a prerequisite. And it’s up to 9 upvotes now so I don’t know what’s going on.

What? That’s not what independence means. They need to be independent, yes, because otherwise you might get into weird corner cases where the probably doesn’t converge to 1, but they don’t have to be equally likely. In fact, weighing the odds based on how often letters are used by Shakespeare should lower the expected timeframe. Heck, Shakespeare doesn’t use “J”, why would that key even be relevant? Where in the world do normal distributions even come into this? How does this comment have 4 upvotes? What am I missing here?

I’ve heard him (accurately) being referred to as a serial one-hit wonder. He also did Mouth Sounds, made the comic about Ariel getting 8 legs, and did the Guide to the Races of Star Trek and its spin-offs.

Oh no, I’m so sorry, the microplastics got you too: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Language_and_the_euro&diffonly=true#Written_conventions_for_the_euro_in_the_languages_of_EU_member_states

And Last Chance to See! It’s somehow almost as absurd as his fictional works.

… it’s not really an opinion piece? It’s mostly a breakdown of the church’s dubious history and leadership. I’m sure they also do video game stuff, but that feels like it has no bearing on the actual facts presented.

It seems quite a few modern birds (Aves) lineages survived the K-Pg extinction (at least 5, last I checked), but when exactly they diversified is apparently still a contentious issue. The common ancestor almost definitely lived sometime during the cretaceous, so not THAT long ago in the grand scheme of things, but it definitely lived either before or during T-rex’s reign.

I was referring to Avialae, which is the clade defined as all dinosaurs more closely related to budgies than to deinonychus. Many of them would have seemed quite birdy to us, but like the other dinosaurs not many of them made it to the current day and the ones that did are all Aves.

In case anyone genuinely has this misconception: birds branched off from the other dinosaurs during the Jurassic, probably over 100 million years before the astroid hit. Dinos didn’t suddenly grow feathers and a beak because a big rock hit them.