flora_explora
@flora_explora@beehaw.org
- Comment on Girl power 5 hours ago:
Nope, seeing men as the default and considering everyone else as a secondary option is already a discrimination of the latter. I know that “alle Schüler” is referring to everyone in class, but it is not gender neutral. It assumes male students if not specified otherwise.
- Comment on Hey kid 6 hours ago:
My intuitive explanation would be that all things have different states in which they can be: solid, fluid/liquid and gaseous. It just depends on how cold or hot it is what state the material is in. Even oxygen can be fluid at sufficiently low temperatures and metals gaseous at really high temperatures. (This varies with pressure, but maybe this gets too complicated then.)
So when ice gets too warm (because it isn’t in the freezer anymore for example), it changes its state to a liquid. You can imagine all molecules to be in various interactions with each other. When it is cold for them, they snuggle together and form a solid clump. When it gets warmer they begin to dance and not be as close anymore. They sway together and form a fluid. But when they are really hot they are even further away from each other so now they are pretty lose, forming a gas.
- Comment on When you're in too deep 9 hours ago:
This is especially true when you are talking with people in various languages and they all want you to know the common name of an organism.
More confusing is that I know some organisms only by their common name, some by both names and most only by scientific names.
iNaturalist gives always gives me the scientific names first but varies in common names between the different local variants. It is confusing if some are in English, others in German or Spanish etc.
- Comment on Ya yeet 9 hours ago:
If you zoom in, you can see that the “beak” is behind the leg in the foreground actually.
This got me interested and I looked up heteropteran mouthparts. The best description I could find was here. Apparently the segmented larger part of the beak here is the labium giving support to the stylus. The stylus is the blackish tube that runs from the head through the labium. Maybe this means that the stylus isn’t actually extended into the human here because it loops back a bit on the head. So the claim of the meme might be wrong!!
- Comment on The meme is the price tag. 10 hours ago:
This is the other way around. The price tag in the meme is for researchers to pay so their article gets published in the journal. And it will be an open access article, so people who want to read it won’t have to pay anything. What’s so crazy about this is the huge prize tag for publishing your paper. It cannot be that costly to run an online journal.
- Comment on Girl power 10 hours ago:
What? How can this be true? “The generic masculine is gender-neutral”? You see where you made a mistake? German and most other languages revolve around a pretty strong gender hierarchy and patriarchy. So no, its default is definitely not gender neutral! I would be in favor of a true neutral. But we would have to come up with a new form.
- Comment on Futures 10 hours ago:
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing :)
- Comment on Cruciferae 3 days ago:
While I agree with the acronym, I have to disagree with the statement. I really dislike the look of most Brassicaceae. Especially Brassica oleracea :(
- Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though. 3 days ago:
Wtf is wrong with you?
- Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though. 3 days ago:
Wow there, you assume I was arguing in bad faith but I was just genuinely curious to discuss this. No need in being so rude.
I think you still got a lot mixed up here. When I was talking about GMO plants I didn’t talk about all the awful practices of today’s capitalist corporations. But GMO in itself could be great for feeding many people in a world after capitalism. Glyphosat and other pesticides are really not the same as GMO. Do you actually know what GMO means and how it works? I’m not necessarily a fan of GMO and think we should be very cautious with it. But just dismissing it as obviously evil without understanding what it means is wrong imo.
Similarly I think it is not really clear what we discuss when er talk about industrial agriculture. In my mind it is solely the production of agricultural crops at a large scale and by means of employing machines. It seems like you think of it like our modern capitalist agriculture. This thread was originally about how to feed huge populations of people and I think we will need industrial agriculture. However, what we understand today under industrial agriculture is just one way of doing it. I obviously know that today’s conventionally farmed crops and monocultures are really bad for biodiversity and the environment. And I sure want to see then gone just like you. But even organic farming relies a lot on industrial agriculture. And I don’t think it is really true that homegrown crops in small community gardens are necessarily more nutritious or delicious than organically+industrially farmed crops.
And this was my overall point. Just because you feel like something tastes/looks better doesn’t mean it is actually better. That’s what I mean by idealization. I don’t think we get that far just claiming some practices are evil and others are good.
I’m gardening myself and sure it does help me with my mental health. But that is because I can choose to work in the garden whenever I feel like it. But if I had to work on a farm because we need all the people working the fields, it would certainly not improve but rather deteriorate my mental and physical health. But still, this has nothing to do with your claim that soil bacteria actually function as natural antidepressants.
And please seek help with your anger issues if you haven’t already. It is totally off to call someone “disingenuous bastard” if they just try to start a debate. (Just to be sure: I don’t mean this in a passive-aggressive way.)
- Comment on Gotta love moms 4 days ago:
Related (pun intended): www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNQPQkV3nhw
- Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though. 4 days ago:
Not only that. But our agriculture is so centered around animals that we also have a huge surplus of manure (the animals’ feces, horn shavings, basically anything left of them) that we then use on all kinds of plant crops. It is so baked into the system that it will be a long way before we can really get a animal-free agriculture…
- Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though. 4 days ago:
This is certainly true for our modern agriculture today. But is this really true for any possible industrial agriculture? Couldn’t we also have a plant based industrial agriculture leaving domesticated animals out of the equation altogether? Sure, we are a far way off from that. But I think it would be achievable and that we should aim for it.
- Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though. 4 days ago:
I would be cautious of statements like these. Because this way it is easy to get lost in your own idealization of community gardening. I mean, I agree that we should do more community gardening and that it would probably benefit most people.
But how do you know that industrial farming won’t ever be as nutritious/delicious as homegrown? How would you fall back on your own garden in case of a nuclear catastrophe? Wouldn’t your soil just be as contaminated? What are your arguments against GMO crops apart from all the obvious economic reasons? Wouldn’t be some genetic mutations be really good actually? I mean the food we eat is already heavily bred and mutated, even most homegrown stuff. Try eating a wild carrot or wild apple. Also, the article you shared regarding the antidepressant properties of soil makes some same mistakes. It is overly idealistic. The actual underlying study is much less ambitious and I’m not sure you can really claim that "working with soil has natural antidepressant properties ".
I love cooking and don’t really like eating out. But if a canteen/cafeteria is run well, it can sure cook much larger quantities of food that are just as delicious and nutritious. It just scales better. I would argue the same is true for agriculture. (Although we definitely would need to change agriculture by a lot!)
- Comment on Shrimp is bugs 5 days ago:
Well, not really. One are insects the other crustaceans. Woodlice would probably be a better comparison?
- Comment on bugs 1 week ago:
Well, sweet tomato marmalade is actually quite tasty ;)
- Comment on Has Generative AI Already Peaked? - Computerphile 1 week ago:
Great video, thanks! Regarding the over representation of certain concepts/things I have been disappointed from day one by generative AI. If you want it to draw you something obscure it miserably fails and tries to fall back on stuff it knows. Also all the discriminatory biases generative AI has about different people because of lacking data sets. It is very obvious that it cannot “outperform” its own data input (like the exciting curve in the video) but that it will rather stagnate.
- Comment on pick your side 1 week ago:
The one I was always certain about is that biology should be green. Chlorophyll and the photosynthesis based on it are just so important for nearly all life forms that green is very much deserved by biology only.
- Comment on Moon dust 1 week ago:
Well, if humans were a homogeneous population maybe that could work. But just imagine the huge number of factors at play here. Like, demographics, cultural background (different exposures & different allergy rates in general I would guess), genetic susceptibilities, individual lifestyles (e.g smoking) and probably a lot more! Even a sample size of 1000 seems pretty small to test for general human allergy rates to moon dust. If you were talking about just one population of humans, e.g. maybe the US, you probably would need more than 30 but maybe not 1000.
- Comment on Living 1 week ago:
Depends what you mean by cockroach. The usual pests are not really around. But there are some smaller ones that are sometimes also found inside the house. I frequently find this one in my home for example, which is really cute <3
- Comment on Hardcore 1 week ago:
Not only the first paper but it apparently was published in nature:
- Comment on Water Dragons 1 week ago:
- Comment on Maggots 1 week ago:
Those teeth look kinda photoshopped in…
- Comment on Too op 1 week ago:
It is actually the other way around, many fly species are pests to humans costing them a lot of money. Flies are also the greatest killer of humans and there have been massive efforts undertaken to get rid of e.g. mosquitoes.
- Comment on Blaps 1 week ago:
I’m probably biased because insects fascinate me :D
- Comment on Too op 1 week ago:
That’s certainly not true. You cannot foresee the implications of all flies (i.e. the order Diptera) to go extinct. There are many that are pollinators and others (including mosquitoes (Culicidae)) that are important food source for other animals. Without flies the food web would change a lot and we don’t know what effect it would have on humans. But pretty sure that the ecosystem would be even less resilient and be more endangered to collapse.
- Comment on Blaps 1 week ago:
Wiki says that they aren’t a pest and rather eat organic debris. Sounds quite nice actually!
- Comment on Imagine denying other living and breathing lifeforms agency to thrive amd change lol lol lol 2 weeks ago:
You may like Bruno Latour and his rather philosophical book Politics of Nature. I read it in a philosophy seminar and it seemed fascinating how the author tries to completely overthrow the view we have on “nature” and give it agency.
- Comment on blast me off, fam 2 weeks ago:
My first thought was gram times second times meter per kilogram xD
- Comment on Morish Morals 2 weeks ago:
Wow, the plot in the fifth elephant makes so much more sense now. I didn’t know that the scone of stone was a real thing!! :O