It just looks that way because they’ve got very narrow heads. Its much clearer on owls, which have very broad faces, that birds of prey have fully forward facing eyes.

My point is that they’re entirely forward facing. Calling it a mammal rule isn’t really accurate. It’s about whether or not the animal needs to judge distance to attack. Sharks use their vision to scan for prey above and below them, but they use their other sense to attack. Hawks and cats have a significantly different sense of vision, but both need to be able to accurately judge distance with their eyes when attacking.

That article says exactly what I said about Panda’s:

Despite its taxonomic classification as a carnivoran, the giant panda’s diet is primarily herbivorous, with approximately 99% of its diet consisting of bamboo. However, the giant panda still has the digestive system of a carnivore, as well as carnivore-specific genes, and thus derives little energy and little protein from the consumption of bamboo. The ability to break down cellulose and lignin is very weak, and their main source of nutrients comes from starch and hemicelluloses.

While primarily herbivorous, the giant panda still retains decidedly ursine teeth and will eat meat, fish, and eggs when available. In captivity, zoos typically maintain the giant panda’s bamboo diet, though some will provide specially formulated biscuits or other dietary supplements.

They have developed some minor digestive traits that help them process bamboo, but they don’t have the four chambered stomach of a cow or the extra-long hindgut of a gorilla to thoroughly digest plant matter. They have to seasonal migrate to get the amount of nutrients they need from young bamboo shoots and mature bamboo leaves. Their bodies could easily process a carnivorous diet, but their metabolism has become too slow for then to manage to hunt almost anything besides plants.

I don’t think there’s a hard rule you can put on it. Sharks are ambush predators, but they need a wide field of vision to scan above and below for prey. Monkeys are mostly herbivores or opportunistic omnivores, but they have forward facing eyes to jump through trees. It’s just about what they animal needs their eyes to do, and forward facing eyes are mostly used for trying to grab another animal.

Pandas aren’t true herbivores, they’re more like vegetarians. Their teeth, digestive tracks, and eyes are all better adapted to eat meat, but they’re too dumb and clumsy to catch any, so they’ve settled on bamboo. If a smaller, dumber, clumsier animal moved into their ecosystem, they would start eating it immediately.

Birds of prey have entered the chat.

More or less.

I would let Beaker take them first and watch what happens.

Yeah, the bloated police state and anonymity of most real estate moguls makes this is logistically impossible. That being said, the reaction to the United Healthcare CEO’s killing and the number of ICE, “assaults,” that can’t get grand jury indictments makes me think this spirit is still alive.

Carl?

Chicken or bird?

RFK is a true believer; he actually thinks, against all evidence and logic, that vaccines are bad for your health. Trump does not give a shit about vaccines, but he offered RFK the CDC position because A) RFK was running a third-party candidacy in 2024 that could have cost him several swing states and B) anti-vaxers are a large part of the Trump coalition, but he was losing their trust after promoting the covid vaccine. Most congressional Republicans are just going along with this out if cowardice.

So, tl:dr: ending vaccines is what RFK (stupidly) believes in, Trump put him in power to return a favor/appease a portion of his base, and every other Republican is too chicken-shit to do anything about it.

Sees someone articulating the problem of streaming platforms elevating low quality or toxic media in children’s feeds.

You (a genius): “This is bad parenting.”

Yeah, I was a teen in the early 2000s too. Most people still consumed most of their media through live TV. Anyway, you’re right, I should build a home server and start burning my own torrented DVDs. That’s the only reasonable solution to, “apps suggest crappy shows to my kid,” and it’s definitely the thing a parent of a toddler has the time to do.

Yeah, thanks, I’m not looking for notes.

Except they didn’t. They mostly watched live TV.

Paw Patrol is empty calories. It doesn’t teach emotional regulation like Daniel Tiger, or shapes and colors like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, or numbers, letters, and problem solving like Sesame Street. It’s not harmful like Cocomelon, and I’ve accepted that my son loves it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

Curating what your child consumes, both dietary and cultural, is the basic requirement raising a child.

Yeah, I curate what my child consumes, thanks, I just don’t have the time or energy to create a bespoke tablet of torrented kids shows to present him, or track down a circa-2002 portable DVD player and start a new physical media collection. If you’ve got that kind of free time, great, but I’ve just got to use the apps I’ve got, accept that he’s going to want to watch some shows that I find worthless, and make sure he doesn’t consume anything actively harmful.

I don’t give him a tablet, he only watches at home on TV (or a phone on very long car trips). I don’t know a toddler parent that has the time to download a curated media library for their kids, and even if you do have the time, things like that fall apart eventually. My wife and I managed to avoid most crap TV until we wound up in a hotel room with two dead phones and a fussy toddler, and that’s when we finally caved and put on Nick Jr. For a while, we managed to convince him that Paw Patrol was only available in hotels, but eventually he saw the thumbnail for it when we were trying to show him Dora the Explorer, and that beautiful lie finally died.

Holy shit, I did not know you could do that. That is going to be life changing.

App suggestions make it so hard to keep kids away from slop. I started out only letting my toddler watch PBS Kids programs and a few other educational programs, but then your kids start seeing suggestions for all sorts of shlock, and they want to see the show with the superhero kitties is (it’s called Super Kitties and it is garbage). God help you if you try to watch something on YouTube; every suggested video is either low-quality home movies of people playing with toys (which is like crack to toddlers or weird shit like this that absolutely shouldn’t be on YouTube Kids but often is anyway.