llewelly

llewelly, 17 days ago

@gay_ornithischians I don't even understand it. (Possibly it has something to do with movies, which I don't watch.)

llewelly, 17 days ago

@futurebird
I wish the sex lives of famous people were never in the news. (Yes, I've heard all the pseudo-anthropological just-so stories about "why" they are news. )

llewelly, 17 days ago

@futurebird
wasn't there a 1980s song about this ant? Released a few years after that Gibson novel you just re-read, if I recall correctly.

llewelly, 17 days ago

@futurebird there's a whole genre of games which are "manage government policies to combat fossil-fuel-driven global warming". I've never played any of them; the genre developed after my love for games was killed. But the same principles could be applied to a game about managing a garden, or a game about replanting a wildlife conservation area.

llewelly, 18 days ago

@futurebird
the numerator is clearly the area of a portion of pizza. The denominator is a trap to keep the unwary confused and befuddled while ants steal the pizza.

llewelly, 18 days ago

@ai6yr
The mad characters of software have escaped to the world of flesh, where they wreak havoc without bound!

llewelly, 19 days ago

@futurebird I want Arthropleura, the 2 meter millipede, back.

llewelly, 19 days ago

@futurebird when I was a child, one of my favorite novels where the Harry Harrison series that begins with West of Eden. In that novel, the Yilane do everyhing with genetically modified organisms; ocean craft are genetically modified ichthyosaurs, conversations are recorded by genetically modified frogs, cities are housed in giant genetically modified trees, and so on. It would be wonderful to re-envision this with ants.

llewelly, 19 days ago

@futurebird
binturong, binturong
how long has it been
since your lineage
was split from the cats?
forty million years,
more or less

binturong, binturong
how long has it been
since your lineage
was split from the bears?
fifty-five million years!

binturong, binturong
not a cat nor a bear
live in trees and get weird
eating bugs and fruit
with bright bristly hairs
and white whiskers
on your nose

#poetry
#binturong
#Viverridae

llewelly, 19 days ago

@barrygoldman1 @futurebird
if I was confronted with a mixture of skulls from cat-like caniforms and dog-like feliforms, I doubt I could separate them correctly.

llewelly, 19 days ago

@futurebird
in a way I'm kind of sad I only had a few chances to the play the old SimAnt game, back in the days before working in the industry destroyed my love of video games.

llewelly, 19 days ago

@vlrny
it's just tryin' to beat the rush hour traffic

llewelly, 20 days ago

@gay_ornithischians
1/2

elephants, provided it's ok to include stem-elephants.

• pan-elephants eat at a wide range of levels, like a sauropod, they do it by using a light and highly mobile appendage - the neck for sauropods, the trunk for pan-elephants

• pan-elephants were highly diverse and lived in a wide range of environments, across many tens of millions of years, like sauropods

llewelly, 20 days ago

@gay_ornithischians
2/2

• pan-elephants were persistently among the largest, or, more often, actually the largest land animals of their era, like sauropods.

• beavers are surely fascinating and wonderful animals, and they're impressive in their ability to tear down trees for food and shelter, but they're not especially big, and they don't feed on as wide a variety of plants.

llewelly, 20 days ago

@gay_ornithischians
I'd put them ahead of beavers, because it seems to me they consume a much wider variety of vegetation, in a wider variety of environments, and they've been at it longer (so far), but because they're so small they fall behind pan-elephants.

llewelly, 20 days ago

@gay_ornithischians I like giraffes in their own right, but as sauropod-mimics, they're below beavers; they have huge, heavy heads and totally fail on acquiring food with a light, mobile appendage. They don't live in a wide range of environments. (Fossil giraffes expand that quite a bit, but it still ends up less than beavers and far less than elephants.) Sauropods were probably good at getting to off shore islands, and that's something elephants also do well, but giraffes totally fail.

llewelly, 20 days ago

@gay_ornithischians @apophis
this seems very familiar somehow - maybe I read it. I'm not sure though.

llewelly, 20 days ago

@gay_ornithischians @apophis
oh, wow, there really was such a thread, only 2 years ago, but, hilariously, I argued against the idea, although most of my objections had to do with things other than eusociality.

https://svpow.com/2022/04/13/why-are-elephants-so-small/#comment-238989

llewelly, 19 days ago

@gay_ornithischians @apophis
I don't really know, but I can't think of a major reason that would have changed.

As far as I know, that was based on studies of its center of mass, like this 2006 paper by DM Henderson:

https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-vertebrate-paleontology/volume-26/issue-4/0272-4634_2006_26_907_BGCOMS_2.0.CO_2/BURLY-GAITS--CENTERS-OF-MASS-STABILITY-AND-THE-TRACKWAYS/10.1671/0272-4634(2006)26[907:BGCOMS]2.0.CO;2.pdf

Look on page 5 , and you'll see Henderson estimates the center of mass of Diplodocus is more or less at its hips.

llewelly, 20 days ago

@futurebird I checked all the boxes. But in all honesty, I quit milk, cream, and half-and-half because it seemed to me practically every grocery store I tried didn't keep them cold enough, and just let them get warm and go bad. And, look, I've worked as a stocker at a grocery store, and I get that it's not easy. But it's really essential.

llewelly, 20 days ago

@futurebird @dalias
maybe? I have seen ultra-pasteurized cream, so, maybe pour some ultra-pasteurized cream on top of some ultra-pasteurized milk. Is that close enough?

llewelly, 21 days ago

@amoroso @nasa @esa
there are also many many unofficial bots that repeat information from various weather agencies;

see https://m.ai6yr.org/public/local
and https://bots.krohsnest.com/public/local

#wx

llewelly, 21 days ago

@gay_ornithischians
Thank you. Personally, for me they're nearly the same.

Picard:
"And he piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon he would have shot his heart upon it."

Original:
"He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."

llewelly, 21 days ago

@gay_ornithischians
for me, the changes amount to two moderizations: "... from Adam down; ..." is probably meaningless to many modern audiences, and "mortar" is often not recognized by modern audiences, and a few other minor elisions.

llewelly, 21 days ago

@gay_ornithischians
maybe I've just wasted more time reading 19th century stuff than you. : )

A lot of modern audiences would probably favor your view; today, most people view Moby Dick as overly wordy and archaic. Which is perfectly ok; it's not as if Moby Dick contains some essential insight they can't get any other way.