flora_explora
@flora_explora@beehaw.org
- Comment on The blue light from your phone isn't ruining your sleep 6 days ago:
Not necessarily. I don’t consume any social media that algorithmically serve me content, but my sleep schedule is still utterly fucked up. I can easily do an offline puzzle for hours instead of going to sleep for example.
- Comment on Birthing pains 1 week ago:
The whole series is really fun! (But it’s unfortunately not very long). You can find it on dropout tv and it is called wtf 101.
- Comment on North America contains some of the longest continuous decididous forest records on the planet. 1 week ago:
I don’t think it is real. It seems to be the oversimplified and overexaggerated story of what is really happening. The guardian says that the US Forest Service will move headquarters from Washington DC to Salt Lake City:
theguardian.com/…/us-forest-service-washington-dc…
This seems to cause many of its research facilities to (temporarily?) close:
- Comment on shiny ❍⩊❍ 1 week ago:
Eww… just another state with imperialist and fascist history that has done many genocides (none of which it has ever acknowledged)
- Comment on First Satellites 1 week ago:
In times of authoritarian and fascist uprising, I think we should be careful what ideas we spread. The telling of a “German” or “Russian” people that are “natural” ethnicities is not far from right wing ideology. Why would you even use “Germans” and “Germanic people” synonymously? That’s anachronistic and they don’t really have anything to do with each other. Some Germanic people also lived where Ukraine is now btw.
It isn’t even clear if “Germanic peoples” existed as a distinct group of people:
Different academic disciplines have their own definitions of what makes someone or something “Germanic”.[3] Some scholars call for the term’s total abandonment as a modern construct, since lumping “Germanic peoples” together implies a common group identity for which there is little evidence.[4] Other scholars have defended the term’s continued use and argue that a common Germanic language allows one to speak of “Germanic peoples”, regardless of whether these ancient and medieval peoples saw themselves as having a common identity.
Oh, and the Nazis did synonymize both Germans and Germanic peoples as well:
The publishing of Tacitus’s Germania by humanist scholars in the 1400s greatly influenced the emerging idea of “Germanic peoples”. Later scholars of the Romantic period, such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, developed several theories about the nature of the Germanic peoples that were highly influenced by romantic nationalism. For those scholars, the “Germanic” and modern “German” were identical. Ideas about the early Germans were also highly influential among members of the nationalist and racist völkisch movement and later co-opted by the Nazis. During the second half of the 20th century, the controversial misuse of ancient Germanic history and archaeology was discredited and has since resulted in a backlash against many aspects of earlier scholarship.
To synonymize “Russians” with “Slavic people” is also wrong, as Slavic people where a diverse group of very different people living in a different regions of the world. We also don’t know where the early Slavic people lived exactly.
- Comment on First Satellites 1 week ago:
That anecdote doesn’t make any sense though. Like who are “the Russians” and why didn’t they have prior knowledge of other ethnic groups before? And “the Germans” is a very recent group of people that isn’t ethnic at all.
- Comment on A shrubbery! 1 week ago:
Hm, I think there is a clearer ethical distinction between vegetarians and vegans. But this doesn’t necessarily translate towards the participation in our capitalist system.
For example, I’m a long-time vegan but due to my financially very limited resources I mostly buy cheap conventional food, even vegan meat substitutes from actual meat companies (they are way cheaper). In contrast, a friend of mine is living vegetarian, but she works on an organic farm. So she works towards a more sustainable agriculture while also consuming nearly only organic products.
- Comment on A shrubbery! 1 week ago:
Eating eggs -> financially supporting a system where male chicks get either immediately killed after birth or more rarely are later killed for their meat. Also it is supporting a system where chickens are bred to produce as many eggs as fast as possible, which means a life of torture to them
Drinking milk -> financially supporting a system where cows are continuously impregnated against their will and where their offspring is immediately taken from them and killed for their meat (I think this is done yearly). Also it is supporting a system where cows are bred to produce as much milk as fast as possible, which means a life of torture to them
There are certainly many more atrocities happening, but I’m trying not to think too often of that stuff
- Comment on Let's ask this AI app! 1 week ago:
You’re totally right! I forgot that this is very dependent on where you live. In the area where I usually collect boletes, there are zero poisonous ones and only some that are hard to digest or bad tasting.
- Comment on A shrubbery! 1 week ago:
This is a play on the two meanings of herb. Of course they are still “herbs” in the culinary sense. But in a botanical sense you would classify plants into categories like herb(aceous plant), sub-shrub, shrub, tree, vine, liana, etc. This doesn’t affect culinary names though.
- Comment on A shrubbery! 1 week ago:
That wheat is a grass is even easier to understand than corn also is one. And don’t forget bamboo, which can even grow into huge “trees” forming large bamboo forests!
- Comment on A shrubbery! 1 week ago:
Vegetarians aren’t real because they still support mass murder of animals! (partly /s)
- Comment on Let's ask this AI app! 1 week ago:
It isn’t that hard to correctly ID Amanita rubescens and I’ve eaten it quite a few times. But if I’m the only one responsible for identifying it I wouldn’t dare to eat it. With boletes I’m much more lenient and don’t even know the species all of the time :D
- Comment on Let's ask this AI app! 1 week ago:
Well, one could argue that it is the other way around. We consider most mushrooms as feasibly edible when it is easy enough to distinguish them from non-edible ones. There are thousands of mushroom species out there that are probably edible but that are just not worth anyone’s time. And we also focus more on certain groups of mushrooms that contain a higher percentage of edible ones, like boletes (and also champignons).
- Comment on LEARN THE TRUTH 1 week ago:
Yes, that’s true. What I meant is that there are insects out there where the segments aren’t as obvious. Look for example at this group of beetles where it’s hard to distinguish between thorax and abdomen. It could be that the thorax in easter bunnies start shortly in front of the “ears” and ends just behind the last pair of legs ;)
- Comment on LEARN THE TRUTH 1 week ago:
Who is to say what’s part of the thorax and what not? There are other instances of insects having a thorax that looks divided. In some insects (I think it was beetles) most of the “abdomen” is actually their thorax and so forth…
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Wow, layers of bodyshaming in the meme and comments… :(
- Comment on dying randomly 2 weeks ago:
Not if they are individuals that are unwished for (male chicks) or are killed before their natural death (all livestock, but especially lambs and calves). Also, I think the number of early deaths in factory farming isn’t that low either. Animals die of exhaustion, torture and illnesses.
- Comment on Gottem 2 weeks ago:
Yes, I tried to communicate this difference, but didn’t know how to
- Comment on Just like me fr 2 weeks ago:
This is wrong though. Like obviously it is an animal and no one debates its rough location in the tree of life. There are apparently ongoing discussions if it is a deuterostome or a more basal clade, but that isn’t what the meme is suggesting. Also, there are various described species of Xenoturbella, so you can distinguish them from each other.
And what about the lack of organs?? There is such a great diversity of single celled organisms out there that by definition lack organs (organs are a collection of tissues that serve a common function). So what is the point of even mentioning organs here???
What species has “a clear reason to exist”? That’s a general question and has no particular connection to this group of animals.
This whole meme is just a desperate attempt to create exciting sounding content for social media without doing enough research.
- Comment on Gottem 2 weeks ago:
It’s in the same genus as species who show this behavior, yes. Not sure if this specific species does it though. In any case, even with non-retracting species the interaction is between plant and observing human. In the meme it is just between particles and their environment in general, not related to an observer.
- Comment on Gottem 2 weeks ago:
This has absolutely nothing to do with the meme apart from similar wording. The underlying mechanisms are completely different though
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Oof, I totally get the frustration of this person. I hate questionnaires because they often have logical fallacies or edge cases that they’ve missed. If it is a questionnaire about a systemic issue, I feel that it lacks complexity to see these edge cases. But if it is about a personal issue, it’s even worse because then my edge case isn’t even considered in the questionnaire.
- Comment on stages of mitosis 4 weeks ago:
I feel like this makes everything more confusing. You cannot really follow the hair pins through time because the person takes them out of their hair at one time and the alignment isn’t in the hair. And step 4 confuses what it says (the sister chromatides almost divided) with what it actually shows (the cells almost divided).
- Comment on spoopy figs 5 weeks ago:
Oh, you’re thinking of wasps like yellowjackets. “Fig wasp” uses the taxonomic term “wasp”. There are hundreds of thousands of parasitic wasp species out there that most people aren’t familiar with. Fig wasps are gall wasps and are really tiny! Like so small you can hardly see them by the naked eye. It is fascinating how so small beings can fly distances of many kilometers when they are only a millimeter in size.
- Comment on spoopy figs 5 weeks ago:
I don’t think that’s true. Apparently even Aristotle has spoken about fig wasps (without really understanding what they are or do of course). And it seems like all fig trees are dependent on this kind of pollination.
- Comment on spoopy figs 5 weeks ago:
Yeah sure I’ll eat figs. You don’t eat the fig wasps as they have been eaten by the fig already. If I knew there was a fig wasp still inside, I wouldn’t eat it though.
- Comment on spoopy figs 5 weeks ago:
Yes exactly. They are both dependent on each other in that way.
And to add on to that, figs are super important food trees in the tropics, because they are the only trees that produce fruits all year around. (Because they have to, otherwise the fig wasp population couldn’t sustain itself.) So many animal species are also dependent on the steady food source of fig trees (btw most look very different from the common fig tree, Ficus carica).
- Comment on Dear Faith IX 5 weeks ago:
Oof, this whole email exchange reads super misogynistic, but this one here in particular! Poor Faith :(
- Comment on Dear Faith IX 5 weeks ago:
I think what that means is that both AI and language learners often use more formal language. If you are learning a new language you usually start by visiting classes or other formal and structured resources. But native speakers don’t actually use that idealized form of language very much. I guess that the training set of AI was mostly texts written in more formal language and/or that there isn’t a strong enough consistent bias for most informal language.