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Cake day: January 11th, 2026

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  • I did my dissertation on captive Asian elephants housed in a zoo and how it can influence their behaviour. Did you know that riding elephants is really bad for their back? And concrete floors can cause them to have arthritis in their feet? As well as other locomotion behavioural problems. Elephants are matriarchal and are one of the 5 animals believed to have the capacity for sentience. They are very intelligent and have various rituals they do as a herd. Elephant cows take care of the young but male elephants often leave the herd to live in small bachelore groups of other male elephants. Interestingly, cows that have not given birth will help to raise the calves of other female elephants. They share the responsibility.

    Sadly a virus is plaguing elephants known as Elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus though I did not cover that in my dissertation. I did not have a large sample size to monitor the behaviour and had to use another student’s data with theirs and the university’s permission due to extrenuating circumstances. I found that there were some areas of the enclosure (known as zones) that they preferred to avoid and theorized this could be due to the influence of visitors due to the proximity of viewing platforms at those zones. Of course there could also be other factors such as lack of food (in those zones) and hay nets in those areas, lack of enrichment, and since elephants are social they will do whatever the matriarch says most of the time. There were a few other things I found but that was the main thing and my supervisor agreed with me. Thankfully I passed my dissertation in the end. I had to repeat university a few times because of learning differences and autism but I got there in the end!




  • I was talking about the companies Palantir and Anduril. Whoever chose those names are not true Lord of the Rings fans because even though they used names from Lord of the Rings they should know that Tolkien would never have approved of it. Thus, they are not Lord of the Rings fans but rather are just using the names for clickbait purposes. To me personally a tech bro indicates a more casual, nonprofessional - someone who is interested in tech as a hobby. They might do bit coin mining or some casual stock investment but they are not big corporate overlords like those who run Palantir and Anduril. Though of course I could be generalizing too.












  • Well the BBC is technically forcing us to watch it. Many people don’t watch TV at all but constantly receive threatening letters complaigning that we are not paying for a TV License that we don’t use. They want every single household to have a TV and a license even if we don’t watch the BBC. So that is a big problem with a forced narrative from the BBC. I do agree that they do a lot of things well but it’s often too little too late. However, my main issue is not the quality of state controlled media or the ethical problems with that but rather the fact that they keep forcing us to pay for it. Even if we don’t use it.




  • Maybe they should stop forcing this antiquated TV License scam. For those who don’t know, the UK pushes for a TV License to watch Live TV though most people don’t watch BBC anymore. Though I bet they will try to find a way to include Netflix and more in the TV License. EDIT: I agree the BBC should be funded though they are not a perfect entity and state controlled media is very bad especially for journalism. I think they are going about advertising the license in the wrong way and there is a lot of evidence of harassment from letters and visits to get a tv license even if you don’t have a tv!