flora_explora
@flora_explora@beehaw.org
- Comment on Piss off! 9 hours ago:
Lol didn’t even see that! :D
- Comment on On trees... 12 hours ago:
Yeah, like monocots don’t have secondary growth so they have to use some tricks to get that large. Like palms first grow to a certain stem size on the ground (or below) and only then grow up. I wonder how lycopods grew that large considering they are not really ferns even… Oh and ferns also can grow to be trees!
- Comment on they come 13 hours ago:
In some areas and times, cockchafers were served as food. A 19th-century recipe from France for cockchafer soup reads: “roast one pound of cockchafers without wings and legs in sizzling butter, then cook them in a chicken soup, add some veal liver and serve with chives on a toast”. A German newspaper from Fulda from the 1920s tells of students eating sugar-coated cockchafers. Cockchafer larvae can also be fried or cooked over open flames, although they require some preparation by soaking in vinegar in order to purge them of soil in their digestive tracts.[14] A cockchafer stew is referred to in W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants.
- Comment on they come 13 hours ago:
TIL calling beetles by the month they appear in is a mess. In Europe, may beetles are Melolontha, june beetles are Amphimallon (or Mimela), july beetles are Anomala (at least in German). Rhizotrogus is also in the mix, but didn’t get a month assigned.
But then in North America, there are different genera for each month. Phyllophaga in may, Cotinis and Polyphylla in june, none in july…
- Comment on Piss off! 13 hours ago:
With one data point as sample size, it could have been a baby, a huge bodybuilder or anything. Same goes for the
humancow. All of this isn’t reliable data and we shouldn’t even discuss it here. - Comment on We're good, thanks. 1 day ago:
This reminds me of an unfinished crochet project of Anomalocaris I got lying around… If anyone is interested, here is the pattern I’m using: etsy.com/…/nur-muster-anomalocaris-burgess-shale
- Comment on I mean... I don't see the problem? 1 week ago:
That makes it even worse
- Comment on Star Wars Shows the Future of AI Special Effects and It Sucks [404 Media] 1 week ago:
Yeah, that was weird to watch. Not sure if the speaker realizes how bad this new tech still looks.
And in the end he said that it is very important to use these AI models “with the full permission of the talent” and that they “had full access and the rights to the training data”. He obviously just considers Harrison Ford in this moment, but does he realize what that would mean regarding the AI models and their training data they use? And was the presented short film also created with full permission of all artists contributing to the training data? Was this just a blatant lie to make it sound like they work responsibly with AI?
- Comment on It's My Nature 1 week ago:
Was curious, so I looked it up: knowyourmeme.com/memes/o7-slang
- Comment on Here kitty kitty 2 weeks ago:
I think baby-like facial features are just a part of the domestication syndrome. There has been this long-going domestication experiment with silver foxes that could show that when only selected for tameness the foxes still expressed most of the traits found in other domesticated animals, too.
Belyaev was correct that selection on tameness alone leads to the emergence of traits in the domestication syndrome. In less than a decade, some of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears and curly tails (Fig. 2).
Over the course of the experiment, researchers also found the domesticated foxes displayed mottled “mutt-like” fur patterns, and they had more juvenilized facial features (shorter, rounder, more dog-like snouts) and body shapes (chunkier, rather than gracile limbs) (Fig. 3).
- Comment on Good to see someone caring about BiLions 3 weeks ago:
Aw sorry, didn’t get the irony in your original statement…
- Comment on Banananananananana 3 weeks ago:
The older, nicer version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYbWjJsLymE
The newer, more extreme version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=COOxP3_HFcM
- Comment on 🔪🔪🔪 3 weeks ago:
It’s shows a wasp and not a bee…
- Comment on Good to see someone caring about BiLions 3 weeks ago:
Well, if you look at any animal species, assume variations to occur. There are so many different sexes, genders and sexualities out in the animal kingdom, but our society’s cisheterosexual bias has conditioned us to believe that all animals are straight and cis…
As a reading suggestion you may look into Evolution’s Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden
- Comment on ms paint tree 4 weeks ago:
Cycads have palm-like leaves though, so veeery different! I’d say baobabs are not too different in their growth habit from other Bombacoideae (Malvaceae). Compare with e.g. Ceiba, Pseudobombax, Cavanillesia. And the leaves look just like most Malvaceae plants as well ;)
Fun fact: Pseudobombax trees can actually do photosynthesis with their trunk, which is green (or at least has green streaks).
- Comment on You cannot learn without failing. 5 weeks ago:
1000%!! Over the years I’ve lent it to various people and they all loved it very much. It has been the most influential book for me regarding how I view society, capitalism and anarchism.
- Comment on You cannot learn without failing. 1 month ago:
Yeah, the right is how science unfortunately works. My professor told me that science progresses one death at a time. We argued in various papers that the terminology in our field was really messy and didn’t hold up to actual findings, but the old generation of scientists didn’t want to allow any changes. In most research fields there are a few scientists that hold a position of power and that don’t like sharing that power.
Reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and her idea of an anarchist world caught me off guard when she starts exploring exactly this problem in science…
- Comment on wednesday, my dudes 1 month ago:
This isn’t even true, but a useful simplification.
Wikipedia says the following:
Etymology and taxonomy The use of the common names frog and toad has no taxonomic justification. From a classification perspective, all members of the order Anura are frogs, but only members of the family Bufonidae are considered “true toads”. The use of the term frog in common names usually refers to species that are aquatic or semi-aquatic and have smooth, moist skins; the term toad generally refers to species that are terrestrial with dry, warty skins. There are numerous exceptions to this rule. The European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina) has a slightly warty skin and prefers a watery habitat whereas the Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki) is in the toad family Bufonidae and has a smooth skin.
- Comment on PUT. HIM. BACK. 1 month ago:
Reading the introduction of the study (first link), they completely fail to explain why they call this language. Like, first they explain that fungi also have action potentials and that this seems to work like neurons and then they immediately jump to talk about how this could be a language. Am I missing something here? This seems like a legit paper, but why don’t they even attempt to explain or discuss this?
- Comment on purpose 1 month ago:
How do you define “wasp” though? All Hymenoptera? All Apocrita? All Apocrita minus Apoidea and/or Formicidae? All Vespoidea (minus Formicidae?)? Only Vespidae?
What about all the parasitic wasps? All fig trees would die and with them whole food webs. And if all the parasitic wasps that hold other organisms in check would die, this would also lead to a total disruption of so many biomes…
- Comment on Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire? 1 month ago:
Yeah, this quote is sooo wrong on sooo many levels :(
- Comment on i just wanna live 1 month ago:
Are you on iNaturalist yet? It’s similar in that you can try to identify all kinds of organisms that get uploaded and you never run out of new ones :)
- Comment on i just wanna live 1 month ago:
What? Why would it be? I think humans are scared of anything that surprises them or that they cannot immediately understand what it’ll do. But why centipedes in general? I’ve never had any fear of them, unlike other arthropods that moved more erratically and faster.
- Comment on RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE 1 month ago:
Yeah, I was wondering what about a tentacled animal would be so exciting, given that there are so many other tentacled animals out there already…
- Comment on Something-mology 1 month ago:
Oh, this is double hard, isn’t it. My initial thought was that it was a confusion between paedology and pedology (in my head something to do with feet!). But it’s actually soil science… TIL :)
- Comment on unleash your humanities 1 month ago:
Spielberg told Lucas he was interested in making a James Bond film, but Lucas pitched him of an idea “better than James Bond”, outlining the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Well, growing up in Germany with all my grandarents being more on the nazi side of WWII, I feel like the US idea of getting rid of nazis is that you just have to fight them like in WWII. It didn’t work though. German society and politics was still very much made up of nazis afterwards. Sure, they got taken the power to act upon their ideology in the same way as before. What you need is a systemic change where fascist ideas don’t have any space anymore, where emancipatory ideas can grow and where people are liberated in who they are and what they think. But the issue is, misogyny and racism like portrayed by the Indiana Jones movies are strictly opposed to emancipatory struggles. Giving discriminatory ideas like these too much space will again lead to more fascist tendencies. My point is, it isn’t always black and white, nazi or not nazi. I have no idea if my grandparents were all nazis. They were just kids brainwashed into this ideology. My granddad fought in the Wehrmacht against the allies, but he was just 17. It is easy to say “punch nazis” or “kill nazis”. But unless you have a clear cut enemy like in a political party or an opposing army, this gets messy pretty quickly.
- Comment on unleash your humanities 2 months ago:
Why do you choose to see Jones in the context of the 1930s? It is character based on the values of the 80s and onward. On top of being misogynistic, the character of Indiana Jones is also being the white hero playing into many racist tropes. So using Jones as this Nazi fighting hero doesn’t work even on the most basic level. Again, I’m all for punching Nazis, but we should choose better heroes or even better: no heroes at all!
- Comment on unleash your humanities 2 months ago:
Though the character of Indiana Jones or Harrison Ford as a person aren’t really worth to aspire to. Sure, the nazi punching part is great but being a sexist piece of shit isn’t…
- Comment on Fossils on Fossils 2 months ago:
If you like fun but also well-researched stories about people living in pre-modern times, you might also enjoy the weird medieval guys podcast :) They actually did an episode on fossils recently. Another funny story they mention is the one of Johann Beringer’s “Lying Stones”.
- Comment on Anti-acknowlegements 2 months ago:
While I agree with the first part of what you said, I don’t think the longterm solution is to call out individuals and make their lives horrible. It sure is a good way to maybe deter a few people from doing those misogynistic things. But what we need is actual structural change. It shouldn’t be possible these people to do such things in the first place without being sanctioned. And we should educate people more on feminism and intersectional struggles in general.