flora_explora
@flora_explora@beehaw.org
- Comment on You cannot learn without failing. 1 day 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 day 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 5 days 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. 5 days 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 5 days 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? 6 days ago:
Yeah, this quote is sooo wrong on sooo many levels :(
- Comment on i just wanna live 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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.
- Comment on TRUE AND REAL 4 weeks ago:
You still got it mixed up a bit though. There is no “normal” respiration, cells use both types of respiration all the time.
Maybe you could link an article or a study where you’ve hear about this cancer connection? Would be curious what’s behind it.
- Comment on TRUE AND REAL 4 weeks ago:
Your first sentence is wrong (the mitochondria’s primary function is to generate ATP, which then gets transported to elsewhere where its stored energy is used). And your second sentence is confusing. With “broken ATP” you mean ADP? Or broken ATP synthesis? The point of this alternative oxidase pathway is producing some ATP, but inefficiently. And it produces also heat, because of its inefficiency (not all the energy stored in the sugars can be turned into chemically stored energy so it also produces heat energy. Think traditional light bulb). This heat is then used in the inflorescences of some aroids.
- Comment on TRUE AND REAL 4 weeks ago:
Isn’t this just the normal functions of mitochondria in organisms irrespective of kingdom? They burn sugars (in aerobic respiration using oxygen) to produce ATP. ATP can then be used elsewhere in the body as an energy reserve. Animals do it and plants do it. The difference here might rather be that they don’t convert the sugars into ATP but rather use the thermic energy of the reaction to produce heat instead of ATP?
- Comment on genotype rarity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 weeks ago:
Well, the child is three years old and certainly has no concept of gender/sex. So how why is someone apparently assigning gender and sex to this child? Why not just keep it neutral? Especially in context of forced gender and sex assignations as well as intersex child mutilations. Shouldn’t we be much more careful in this context not to force our biases and weird ideas of gender/sex onto children?!
- Comment on genotype rarity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 weeks ago:
Interesting how they call this child a “boy” if the karyotype and genitalia are so ambiguous. Like, why???
- Comment on TRUE AND REAL 4 weeks ago:
This got me interested too and apparently aroids as a family are specialized on doing this.
In lieu of their normal metabolic pathway, which ends in the production of ATP, the mitochondria switch over to a pathway called the “Alternative Oxidase Metabolic Pathway.” When this happens, the mitochondria start burning sugars using oxygen as a fuel source. This form of respiration produces heat.
- Comment on this is a meme about me 5 weeks ago:
Well, duh, I obviously learned LaTeX only to be less productive and procrastinate more. And when I was getting somewhere with it, I had to switch to RMarkdown instead to be able to procrastinate even more! Imagine actually having to think about the content of your work, ugh :/
- Comment on cilanto 🌿 1 month ago:
If you want to know more about this (because in reality it is a bit more complicated) MinuteFood explains it pretty well in this video.
- Comment on Microsoft Follows Google on a Controversial Decision - gHacks Tech News 1 month ago:
Sorry, I misread your question. Yes, google maps shows “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” in Europe as well :(
- Comment on Microsoft Follows Google on a Controversial Decision - gHacks Tech News 1 month ago:
No, it shows Gulf of Mexico. The commenter just wanted to give some good alternatives that people could use!
- Comment on A daunting realization 1 month ago:
I misread, thanks for clarifying :)
- Comment on ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled 1 month ago:
- Comment on A daunting realization 1 month ago:
What? Why does no one in the comments mention that plants don’t decompose dead bodies? This statement is just utterly wrong.
- Comment on Harry Potter and... fits into everything 1 month ago:
Well, that is pretty much US defaultism. I’m not from the US and was talking about academia on an international level.
Your example again just shows how the structure, i.e. the universities working under capitalist logic, are the problem. This doesn’t mean that academics necessarily agree with this change in politics.
I get why you have such a fatalistic view and I agree with your statements about the fascist takeover :(
- Comment on Harry Potter and... fits into everything 1 month ago:
Not sure if this would impact academia all that much since those “pompous” scholars are just a tiny minority. I don’t think academia’s problem lies in individuals being problematic anyways but rather on a structural level. Egoistic, shortsighted and competitive behavior is strongly incentivized. And people that don’t fit that mold get burned out pretty quickly. I think opposite to your argument it is rather an indication of how good human nature can be that academia is still working on such a collaborative and communicative basis despite capitalist and neoliberal pressures.