Notices by llewelly (llewelly@sauropods.win)

@futurebird @Klara
1/2
there definitely was a huge expansion in biological *science*. Most of it very genetics-oriented, but there were also expansions in other areas of biology, including paleonotology and ecology.

the trouble is, investors actually don't like science, especially when it investigates environmental problems, which is where much of the biological science ended up going.

@futurebird @Klara
2/2
what investors love is bubbles, where the expansion makes them rich, and the popping makes everyone else poor, and it's the second part that genuinely differentiates them, and thus they hate everyone who opposes turning the global ecology into just another resource extraction bubble.

@babe 1/3
Pratchett was right, but he's right mainly because the problem he described was already widespread; when I was in high school in worst jordan, utah, around 1990, and didn't have any internet access, the theatre teacher was a huge leni riefenstahll and d. w. griffith fanboy, and I went tromping back and forth between brick-and-mortar libraries to look up whether not these two filmmakers ought to be covered in a theatre class (note: it wasn't a film class, but they were covered anyway),

@cwebber a smart person could penne some clever philosophical pasta puns here, but it's too much for my noodle.

@petergleick
there's plenty of nuclear fusion happening deep within the Sun. I suggest we send all the LLM scammers and their data centers there.

@futurebird @cwebber
before livejournal was sold to the russian mafia (like the usa government ...), I stumbled across a livejournal account that had started a fiction series that was an alternate left-behind series that was somewhat like that; the rapture took people of color, scientists, lgbtq folk, feminists, and so forth. It got very grim, very fast, mainly because the food industries all collapsed quite quickly. Then the author decided they couldn't continue.

@cwebber
is the frothy egg white meant to be added while the yolk and water are still near boiling, or is it ok for the yolk and water to cool while the egg white is beaten to a froth?

(there was a time when I could beat egg whites to a froth so quickly the yolk and water wouldn't cool much, but I sure can't do that now.)

@plexus @cwebber I cdr guessed the rest of the joke

@jonathankoren @ai6yr
better than something they found behind the cask of Amontillado

@HeliaXyana I'm voting collapse the chamberpot.

@futurebird html email is a huge security and privacy problem. Its widespread acceptance enabled widespread use of privacy-invading emails that track whether your computer fetched images or other remote things referred to in the html, as well as many other privacy invading techniques. It enabled the rise of the adtech industry, which is currently backing the nazi administration in the USA.

@irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @dalias @mattmcirvin

trouble is, there's heavy overlap between these 3 types. More than half the linux nerds I knew personally went so far off the blockchain deep end that even the gentlest criticism of anything crypto results in instant hostility.

@mattmcirvin @futurebird @illumniscate

in retrospect, the science-for-kids stuff of the 1970s-1980s was highly credulous. Well, even before then, and presumably after then as well.

I do recall a few exceptions; that episode of _The Bloodhound Gang_ where the young black woman was sure the "superheavy white dwarf" meteorite being auctioned really, actually, couldn't be any such thing ... : )

@froge @futurebird
in the usa, co-operation and mutual support structures are monopolized by white christian religions, and if you try to teach them in school, you'll face outrage from white christians. Not saying it shouldn't be done. But know who will fight you, and be ready.

@futurebird @3janeTA
I don't think there's many times when I've read nearly all of a book and stopped shortly before the ending.

But it often seems the ending is the least fun part of a novel; there's cultural pressure on the author to bring all the threads together in a neat, cinematic closure, a complex and challenging task, which often ends up looking like either a mess, or an artificially slick and unnatural piece of plastic, since closure is irrelevant to the real world.

@futurebird
Dunkleosteus and its close relatives only armored the front of the body.
Turtles and Ankylosaurs armored the whole body! (also, armadillos, pangolins, aetosaurs ...)

@dalias @futurebird @kechpaja
I'd like to know how practical it would be to do thousand-angle photogrammetry with *every* insect in a huge tree that has tens of thousands of insects in it, and then go on to do it for dozens trees, on the budget of a taxonomist, rather than a techno fantasy budget. (I've read microscopic photogrammetry is now being used a lot in mite taxonomy, but they seem not to have the kinds of rigs that can do it fast enough to avoid having to immobilize the specimens.)

@futurebird
some plankton are tiny arthropods. But there are many other kinds of plankton not closely related to arthropods (or to each other), diatoms, radiolarians, algae, cyanobacteria, so many more I don't know anything about.

I don't know if anyone has done any equivalent to the "deathfog a dozen different species of trees, see how many new insects fall out, use that to estimate total insect diversity" experiments for plankton.

@futurebird @mhoye
Dave Rudkin and colleagues found the biggest chonkin' trilobite ever, and they named her Isotelus rex. Nobody uttered the phrase "primordial meatloaf" even once.

https://www.palaeocast.com/episode-2-isotelus-rex/

#FossilFriday
#trilobites
#fossils

them: "how do you feel about reincarnation?"

me: "hate it. I was a coccolithophore 985 times during the Mesozoic, and didn't get to be dinosaur even once. What a ripoff."

#dinosaurs