Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird some time ago I heard a podcast episode on army worms, the fall army worm and the true army worm, two different kinds of caterpillars which feed on grass and reproduce (as moths) in huge numbers thanks to golf courses and suburban lawns. Having spent nearly all my life west of the Rockies, I've never seen them, but I heard they're a "menace"* in the southeast usa, and in bad years can spread as far north as New York and Toronto. (*I hate lawns and root for the caterpillars.)

@futurebird
I can see the headlines already: "Titanic Ant Shows Tycho Crater Moonbase The Wonders Of Eusocialism"

@futurebird
for 2 billion years everyone said "time is a flat circle" and then the Great Oxidation Event happened.

but these days I guess people don't remember such important events.

@futurebird @GezThePez

outside of education, relative drawing is used all the time as well, because things move; first you do relative drawing, then you apply rotations, translations, and perspective transforms.

@futurebird eyes are ok but photosynthesis is where the real energy is at

@futurebird
there's a similar issue in invertebrate (and also conodont) paleontology; much of the support for it is connected, in one degree or another, to its usefulness in biostratigraphy, and in turn, biostratigraphy's use in mining, especially fossil fuels.

@futurebird I feel the same. Invasive species often are able to be invasive because they can live in human-disturbed environments that are difficult or impossible for many former native species. (The podcast Herp Highlights covers this frequently, because it's often difficult to get research money for (non-bird) reptiles and amphibians that aren't invasives. Similarly, the podcast arthro-pod covers invasives because the same applies to insects. )

@futurebird
relevant:
https://mastodon.green/@gimulnautti/114094842441317781

@futurebird thank you, though I suppose I ought to have known.

@futurebird @sepdroid @mattmcirvin

Agreed, but for so much of my life I lived in utah, where big cities are not a thing, at least not on a scale anything like NYC (NYC has something like 2.5 times the population of the entire state of utah), and most utahns would rather believe the cities they live in are much smaller than they actually are, so saying “it’s the whole reason I live in a big city” didn't help.

@sepdroid @futurebird @mattmcirvin
I definitely had some tense conversations in that era, with employers about my politics, or, more frequently, their perception of my politics. But not for things I said online; usually for answering honestly when asked why I didn't drive. Did it play a role in me losing jobs? Probably, but so many of those companies were so badly run the company fell apart first.

@futurebird @sepdroid @mattmcirvin

I was an on-again-off-again livejournal reader, but I never kept a regular "journal" there, because honestly I was always kind of terrified of the idea. (I didn't know it would get bought up by a russian crime lord, but I was worried just the same.)

@futurebird DOE as in Department of Energy?

@mattmcirvin @futurebird

at every job I've ever had, someone would bring up all the bad-faith right-wing lies about taxes every time taxes were discussed in converastions at work. I encountered this at dishwashing jobs and software development jobs, at postal service jobs and community college computer lab jobs; "every job" is not hyperbolic. (I don't know if it varied regionally, but I encountered it just as often in the Puget Sound area of Washington as I did in Utah.) Everyone gets exposed.

@alexwild was it you or @futurebird who started it?

@futurebird
I suppose the "obvious" alternatives might be "streets alive" or "steets of life".

@futurebird I am having a hard time figuring out how I'd react to getting money without strings attached. I've read an awful lot of fantasy novels, but they did not prepare me for this.

@futurebird
I started typing up a joke about anything with a defined 2nd derivative being a curve, but you said continuous, which kinda overlaps with defined 2nd derivative, its not the same thing ...

@futurebird @gray

the car-sized duck:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinocheirus#/media/File:Deinocheirus_mount.jpg

@futurebird I wonder what percentage need to fly at the "right time" in order to pass on their genes.