Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird @colinpurrington @rspfau @nev I have no idea how it could be done without a microscope, and the curator Sam Bolton left me thinking that it can't.

attention bug nerds! arthropod has just released a new episode, interviewing curator Sam Bolton about mites!
https://jonathanlarson.podbean.com/e/arthro-pod-episode-186-interview-with-sam-bolton-curator-of-mites/

@colinpurrington
@futurebird
@rspfau
@nev

#mites
#arachnid
#polyphyly

@futurebird
1. it's not about purring

2. it's not about pets

3. it's not about you all

how many more lies aare in this scam?

@futurebird we've been at war for decades. It's just that practically all the shooting and bombing is only done by one side. Even Luigi was a right-winger until the horrible usa health insurance industry impacted him personally. Even afterwards, there is still no evidence he shifted left in any other parameter.

@futurebird most stephen king novels are terrible, but there are some really good ones, and one of the really good ones is about this topic, but from the viewpoint of a writer dealing with a superfan.

@futurebird I'm just barely old enough to remember nuclear drills, (and perhaps only because I happened to live in an area where they stayed around longer than in some places - it seems in many parts of the usa the drills ended long before the cold war did, or otherwise stopped and started for reasons I don't know. )

@futurebird come on, there's only 10 or 20 thousand species of birds, and probably less than 100 that are "giant". Much easier than ants. Ok, I don't know them all either. Emu is just one of the few I do know. : )

@futurebird the birds are unmistakably Emu. Very well done.

@futurebird The LaRoucheies are climate deniers, fossil fuel industry stooges, and supporters of all manner of hard right nonsense. They haven't done anything "leftist" since the 1960s, and anyone who thinks they're still "leftist" has been living in a nonsense universe longer than I've been alive.

@futurebird I am not willing to dismiss all movements as bad. Depending on the movement, loyalty to a movement could be a good thing, or at least compatible with good things, and in all but the worst cases (such as end-times religions), loyalty to a movement is far preferable to a PAC or an industry.

@futurebird I think every tech company I ever interviewed with went to great effort to convince all prospective employees that they wanted everyone's job to be so great they'd brag about of their own accord.

... and all of those jobs were very bad jobs.

there's a kernel of a good idea underneath it all, but capitalism attracts too many people who see it as just another way to manipulate people into yet another scam.

@Wyatt_H_Knott @notoriousiptg @futurebird @stuartyeates @Quantensalat
I think the ability to store sperm for long periods of time is moderately common in insects generally, but especially ants. But I don't know what they meant by "ancient drones".

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spermatheca

@futurebird @dhobern @stuartyeates @Quantensalat I'm not sure what it means either, but it does seem "only produces queens" is a caste-biasing phenotype, but since that's exactly one caste, it's an extreme end-member, at least to me. So biased towards a specific caste, there are no other castes.

@futurebird @stuartyeates @Quantensalat I don't understand that part either. Maybe, by "prevent queen-only production" they are hypothesizing that without the M. structor sperm the queens could only produce queens, and not workers or males? I'm not sure that's what they meant, it's only a guess.

@Quantensalat @futurebird @stuartyeates
it's been blowing my mind for days. But ... we all know branching points in evolution need to happen somehow, and we all know most of the hows are unknown. This is one of the hows.

@futurebird prior to reaching university, I don't think I ever heard a conversation about lawyers that did not involve a "joke" of the following character:

Q: what do you call a thousand lawyers dead at the bottom of the ocean?

A: a good start

I don't think the combination "corrupt lawyers" is random at all. It's chosen to work with preexisting sociopolitical beliefs

@futurebird in all honesty, as someone who grew up with scent range of the Great Salt Lake, even before you tried to salt it, that poll from Cuomo smelled like it was made from salt, and reeked of fish killed by thousands of kilopascals of osmotic shock. (Like every "clear insights" poll.)

@futurebird 1/5
I will confess that even though the idea that fungi took tens of millions of years to evolve a complete lignin breakdown process is widely accepted in paleontology, I have some issues with it.

First, once you get away from Europe and eastern N. America, there is an awful lot of coal that is younger than the carboniferous; Wyoming has whole mountain ranges of Paleogene coal, and Colorado and Utah also have huge amounts of coal younger than the Carboniferous.

@futurebird ... given the current state of the CDC, if there was a highly dangerous (like 1918 dangerous) flu variant spreading, it would probably get many months to spread before we knew. It is not an accident this happens at the same time as the attacks on vaccines.

@futurebird not gonna watch the youtube, but the light rail (traditional two rail) trains in the town I live in have driver consoles at each end, and a few lines have light enough traffic that don't have seperate rails for each direction, except for a short section where one train can pass another, and when the train reaches the end of the line, it doesn't turn around; instead, the driver just walks to the other end of the train.