Notices by llewelly (llewelly@sauropods.win)

@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

@futurebird I'd have thought a Sirius sky would have been as hot as the dog days of summer.

@me_valentijn @ai6yr @bikemonterey
I like how the pedestrian is clearly a good 60% or 70% taller than the cyclist. Bigfoot, the original pedestrian.

@futurebird I can't do any of these things.

@phaedral @futurebird @Infrapink @jacquiharper

1/2
When traveling 20 miles per hour, your position is changing at the rate of 20 miles per hour. That's a rate of change in your position. A rate of change in position is the first derivative of position, also known as velocity. Velocity, in turn, also has its own first derivative, called acceleration, which is also the second derivative of position.

@cwebber
I misread that line as "Not TODAY, monads." Which is not quite the same thing.

@dendari @phaedral @Infrapink @jacquiharper

The crazy thing is... in a way it *is* the same tangent, or at least for a circle.

Most people know that you can plot a circle using:

x=cos theta
y=sin theta

And let theta go from 0 to 2pi (or 0 to 360 if you like)

Because the x and y co-ordinates of a circle are parametrized by the sin and cos.

Tangent has a geometric meaning here too. And this is why it increases without bound as theta gets close to pi/4 (90 degrees)

scientists: "when cartilage becomes bone we say the cartilage has become ossified"

because otherwise they would need to say "when cartilage bonifies into bone it becomes bona fide bone"

#anatomy
#vertebrates

every now and then, I look at this graph, and think about how, for decades, from 1979 until the boreal fall, or austral spring, of 2016, antarctic sea ice just seemed to ignore global warming, showing no trend. Then, suddenly, as the end of 2016 and the southern hemisphere summer approached, *clunk* antarctic sea ice fell down, and did not get up.

graph by @ZLabe , from https://zacklabe.com/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/

#ice
#globalWarming
#seaIce
#Antarctic
#AntarcticSeaIce
#climate

@angelastella @liw
mknod

@cstross @KevinMarks
thing is, spicy autocomplete is a great generator of disinformation. And with so many billionaire fascists seeking to takeover governments, demand for disinformation generators is huge.

And then there is the long-time fascist love affair with using correlations from sloppy, biased databases and the fake imprimatur of statistics to justify their decisions on who goes to the camps. That too promises money for so-called "AI".

@futurebird
nah, two leaves, just like two dwarves, two elves, two shelves, two hooves, two proves, etc.

@cwebber
thank you for providing the share dot tube link - I can't stand youtube bc reasons, and I'm grateful everytime someone gives me a chance to avoid them.

I don't think I'll ever stop hating the phrase "consume content".
a book doesn't disappear when I read it; I didn't eat it or burn it. Same for movies, music, games, etc.

It is a fundamentally dishonest phrase; it lies about what happens when we enjoy creative work, and it lies about what creative work is.

@MakBerberovic exactly.