It's simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. I can feel their panic.

"Oh no, I did a bad. Go away bad. Oh no, oh no, they're going to find out I did a bad chew. Bad away! Bad away now! Why is this not working?"

Since they seem really intent on collecting all the Taiwanese signs and flags, sounds like it would help if people from all the other countries brought their homemade (hotelmade?) Taiwan flags to the closing ceremony.

I worked in a preschool, and it seems to be a rule that when a toddler gets a bandaid for their owie, they're going to keep wearing it as long as they possibly can. It makes them feel special. And when the other toddlers see that someone got a bandaid, they inevitably all want bandaids too. Of course, adults are more mature and would never behave in this way.

I've never been put under, but I just assumed OP meant that they would say something right before they started counting, not after.

Entomologist

My mom left some plain potato chips at my place shortly after I moved in. I wasn't going to eat them, so every few days, when I saw some crows sitting on the telephone line in the backyard, I'd leave a chip or two so they'd like me. But I knew it wasn't healthy for them so when the bag ran out, I got some raw unsalted cashews and started leaving those instead. The crows stopped coming to my backyard almost immediately. I know the nuts and seeds are healthier, but I think they only wanted the tasty food with no nutritional content. Same, crows. Same.

hunter2

This week's episode is actually really good. You just have to watch the other 1071 episodes first and I swear you'll like it.

"Having legs" was always the most basic tool of bicyclist propaganda. If you have no legs, you can't be fed bicyclist propaganda. The most steadfast anti-biker I knew in my childhood was a corn snake I found in my backyard. Bicycle propaganda did not reach him.

All of these things are bad, but the effect on phytoplankton is most frightening of all. Diatoms provide 50-85% of our global oxygen supply. Not only are rising temperatures a problem for them, but ocean acidification also eats away at their silica-based shells. But it does it slowly so by the time they die, they are in deep water where no other diatoms are around to reuse the silica.

Luckily, there are other ways of recycling diatom remains. The most notable example is the dried lake bed that used to be part of Lake Chad when that lake was far bigger and held many living diatoms. Due to natural changes in climate, the water dried up and that area is now part of the Sahara Desert. About 100 days a year, winds kick the ancient diatom dust high into the atmosphere where it is carried across the Atlantic Ocean and then it settles across South America.

This is a big reason the Amazon Rainforest is so lush. Diatomaceous fertilizer carried all the way from Africa. And since more plants means more photosynthesis, it causes a lot of water that would have otherwise been locked away in the ground to evaporate through transpiration. All of this excess water is blown westward towards the Andes mountain range. In narrower parts of the Andes, the dense Amazonian clouds overcome the rain shadow effect to precipitate across the west side of the Andes.

This rainwater causes erosion of quartz, which is ground into fine silica dust. As silt, this dust is washed into the Pacific Ocean, where diatoms absorb the silica and use it to reproduce. In a beautiful global balancing act, as diatom-heavy lakes in Africa dry up, the remains of those diatoms cause a chain reaction that ends up causing a huge increase of diatoms on the opposite side of the globe.

Great, right? It would be if we weren't replacing so much of the Amazon Rainforest with monoculture farms which don't have nearly the same evapotranspiration effect as the flora of the natural ecosystem. So, not only are we baking the diatoms, not only are we dissolving them with acid, we're also removing one of their most critical reproductive resources.

It's like we discovered how resilient the planet is and how hard it is to kill, and humans took that as a challenge.

Enjoy the oxygen while it's plentiful.

Fine, I'll stop talking about 9gag. Sheesh.